Special Connection Homeschool

I received this today in my email and wanted to pass the information along to you all. Help Pass ABLE Act Take Action! Contact Your Representative HELP US PASS THE ABLE ACT IN THIS CONGRESS! Contact Your Representatives to Convene a Hearing and Vote on the ABLE Act Today As you know, the NDSC endorsed the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act (ABLE) of 2009 (S. 493/H.R. 1205). The ABLE Act will give individuals with disabilities and their families the ability to have a savings account which could fund a variety of essential expenses for the individual, including medical and dental care, education, community based supports, employment training, assistive technology, housing, and transportation. The funds from the account would accumulate interest tax-free. Another important aspect of this bill is that the funds in the Able Account will not count as assets of the individual with a disability when determining their eligibility for important and life-sustaining federal benefit programs...

Our school year ended rather well, it was just really busy and I have not had the time or the inclination to blog much lately. I have started to make exercise a part of my regular routine and I had to find time for it somewhere. It appears it was blogging and spending time on the internet that took the biggest hit, which is alright with me. I do intend to keep this blog up though, especially through the school year. As we ended this year we were pretty much on all the same activities I had already told you about so there was also not much to tell anyway. I will do an update soon though and let you know where she is in all her subjects. For now, here are our summer plans. We have entered Gess in the Summer Reading Program at the library as usual. Gess loves it and this time I am making her read harder books. She is into some early chapter books and I am really proud of her skills. She is finally using book marks to mark her place because the books are longer than her attention...

It was so exciting to get Gess on the Special Olympics team. I was not aware that they started this at such a young age. Children only need to be 8 years of age to join the Special Olympics. Around here though, they do most of the practices and organizing through the public school so I had to figure out how to get involved. I went to our state Special Olympics website and found the contact information for our area and sent out an email. I was contacted by phone and we worked out the details and Gess was on the team. Each child that participates does need to take a physical. Children with Down Syndrome also must have an Atlantoaxial Instability test to make sure there is no risk to their spinal cord through physical activity. They practiced during the school day at the High School. They were very accommodating and welcoming when we joined them there. We also practiced with Gess some on our own, mostly to make sure she understood how to stay in her own lane for the races. Since ...

Now that spring finally has arrived we are taking advantage of playing outdoors. Gess kept asking me to play "hitch" so I thought it was time to teach her the game, as well as the appropriate title, which is baseball. (Maybe she came up with hitch as a blend between hit and pitch, which is not a bad nickname at all!) Gass had played kick ball at AWANA a few times last year and she really had a hard time with the rules. So we took apart some old linoleum, made some bases and just worked on what to do after you hit the ball. We went over which base was first, second and third. Then when she would hit the ball (which she was pretty good at) we would have her run the bases. Now that she is getting that down we are trying to work on teaching her how to determine whether to stop or keep running. For now she is simply to follow the coach's orders. She is having fun, we just need to get a real game going sometime. Here she is learning the game and enjoying the outdoors.

Gess has been doing great reading through the New Testament with me this year. Together we have read the first three gospels and are now starting the book of John. It has been great to hear her read along and see how much she improved, not only in her reading skills, but in her understanding of what she reads. To help supplement that reading we got her the Read and See DVD Bible . The Read and See DVD Bible has 40 Bible stories with pictures in the book and they also read and show the pictures from the book on DVD. The text of the story is shown on the screen as they read it which is a great help for her reading skills. Then, after each story is a song that fits that theme. The words for the songs show up on the screen as well, so it is not only fun to sing, but also is another good way to practice reading. So that makes 40 stories and 40 songs on the DVD and Gess just loves them all. If we cover one of the stories during our reading or lesson time we will end by loading ...

The Kansas City Zoo had their first annual Homeschool Day yesterday. We went with another homeschooling family and really had a great time. It was well organized and I believe truly made learning fun for the kids. We started off with a joint assembly to welcome everyone. Then they explained how and why we classify animals. The rest of day was spent exploring 5 different classifications of animals; Invertebrates, Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds and Mammals. For each category you could choose to attend a presentation, craft, activity (game) or take a tour. Here is Gess in our opening assembly excited to start the day. For our first event we chose to play the Parachute game while learning about Invertebrates. They all got around their parachute and flung the balls around, but this time each of the balls had the name of an animal and they had to first get all the vertebrates out of the mix, then they would pick out certain groups of invertebrates like the bugs, the ones that live in ...

Gesserine has recently discovered certain bodily functions. It is always so funny to hear a child discover these things. Well, for this particular one Gess would be sitting there and suddenly say "It stinks in my private parts!" This really cracked us up, but it also needed to be addressed before she decided to announce this information in public! I have been trying to explain to her that passing gas is something we all do, and that it is perfectly normal, however it's not something we have to tell everyone about. I have recently become a fan of the Doctor Oz show and she loves watching it with me. I thought of writing to him to see if he could address this topic when it occurred to me, he may have already done so. Sure enough, he had a segment titled " Why We All Pass Gas ." Gesserine and I watched this and when we were done she went into the kitchen and got some foods from his video, handed them to me and said "gas." Yep, certain foods can ...