Autism Diagnosis and Summer Homeschool Plans

I have not updated here in a while, mostly because we have been extremely busy and because I've just gotten over my horrible first trimester of pregnancy, during which I was alternatively throwing up and passed out from taking extremely soporific anti-nausea pills. Now I'm back to my old self for the most part and ready to start fresh. We decided to graduate Henry from "Kindergarten" to "First Grade", (for anyone not familiar with homeschooling, grades are often more for other people asking us than for our own reference, as we often work above or below standard grade level in different subjects, making picking which grade we're really in difficult.) In March we had Henry evaluated and he was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He scored high on the IQ test and on the school readiness test, and low on social communication skills. His language was also evaluated and he is extremely verbally proficient, but has a few speech impediments that require speech therapy. The team felt there were plenty of symptoms present to diagnose Autism, and although I don't believe the testing process was perfect, I definitely agree with the conclusion. Since his initial testing he has also had an occupational therapy evaluation, and it was determined that he has both a fine and gross motor delay, requiring OT once a week. He has started speech therapy. He will be starting swimming lessons to improve motor function and as a safety precaution since he has been known to wander, and piano lessons with a teacher familiar with ASD. She actually does music/social therapy for children with autism, but we decided to have her come to our house and do private music lessons before we try the group therapy. Finally we are trying very hard to find a social skills group, where several children with the same social struggles can get together to practice interaction with guidance from a qualified therapist. We are not really taking a break from school for the summer. There are several reasons why, including the fact that we will have a new baby Byrd in the Fall and want to be able to take it easy when baby comes home. More importantly, I feel like Henry will do better sticking to a routine. Here are our homeschool plans for the summer: Henry is 5 1/2 and we are telling him this is "First Grade", although you'll see we are using resources that are both above and below that level. Bible: Christian Light Education 200 series Math: Math-U-See Beta, Worksheets from Math for Gifted Students level 1 Grammar: First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind Handwriting: Handwriting Without Tears K (we are repeating K because this was a struggle last year) Reading: Story Time Treasures Workbook from Memoria Press and accompanying Lit. titles, also just reading for interest Science: REAL Science for kids Biology Pre-level 1 History: SOTW Volume 1 (Honestly we've had a really difficult time getting into this. Henry is a very visual learner and has a hard time listening to the book, so we may have to focus on a timeline or another resource instead.) Social Studies: Christian Light Education 100 series Geography: We will just do a fun review of U.S. geography that we learned last year, and will start new world geography unit sometime next year Latin: Prima Latina, review Latin we learned in Classical Conversations last year

5 Good Investments to Make for Your Homeschool

1. Amazon Prime - For those of us with tiny libraries, this is a must. I order books, supplies, even diapers and shampoo when I'm too busy teaching kids to read good and can't get to the store. Right now they have free Prime for moms, which means free shipping and access to all of their free movies, music, and tv shows.

2. A laser printer - These babies are expensive, so I watched Amazon for a while to get a good deal. Even though the up-front cost is high, the money you save on ink more than makes up for it. Our black and white model is a workhorse and I am saving up to get a color one soon.

3. A giant piece of furniture with a bunch of tiny drawers - This is something you've really got to hunt down. Ours is a metal filing type cabinet with paper-sized drawers that I covered with contact paper. I've seen some fabulous old library card catalogs repurposed into homeschooling storage. Whatever you use, make sure to find one with more drawers than you think you need, as they fill up quick. Ours houses pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, all manner of office and craft supplies, and recyclable bits and pieces like paper towel rolls.

4. Bookshelves - Every room in our house has bookshelves. It's good to have some out of the way shelves for resources you won't need very often, and some very accessible ones for your everyday resources. We keep our most used books and resources in the living room, so that I can easily grab what I need for the next day.

5. Extra help - You can not do everything. Scratch that. You can not do everything well. Homeschool moms do a lot. We wear many hats, and sometimes you've got to put some of those on someone else in order to keep your priorities straight. For us, that means I accept when my mom offeres to do an occasional load of laundry for me. I sometimes get the groceries delivered so I don't have to drag two kids through the store. When the budget allows, I plan on paying for someone to help me do some cleaning, and you better believe my kids are learning to help out. There is this crazy idea that some of us have that we have to do it all. What I'm saying is that it's better to do a good job on the important things and delegate the rest.

Top Five Best Resources for Teaching Your (Young) Child to Read

Reading is not generally taught in school until children are 5-6 years old, but many children are able to and even beg to be taught at a younger age then this. Here are a list of resources we found most helpful in helping my son when he began reading at 3.

1. Repetitious Books.
Reading books that contain repeating phrases or words is one of the best ways to teach reading. When you read these catchy stories, make sure to run your finger beneath the words as you read, and watch your child begin to pick up the patterns.

2. A moveable alphabet.
Wooden, plastic, sandpaper, even the pieces to a puzzle make great manipulatives for teaching letter sounds and reading. I've used magnet letters, scrabble tiles, or boggle dice to spell out new words. The act of putting the moveable letters into place is excellent for developing fine motor skills, and children who are not yet ready for writing can still form new words.

3. Leap Frog videos.
Letter Factory teaches the letter sounds, Word Factory teaches how to put those sounds together into words, as well as some blends and vowel teams. Storybook Factory focuses on chunking, the ability to reach sentences and understand punctuation. Phonics Farm is another great one for learning letter sounds.

4. Classical Phonics.
This little book from Memoria Press was my go-to guide for teaching phonics rules in an order that made sense. The book starts with letter sounds, then teaches phonics rules one at a time, and includes word lists to practice the new rule. They also have workbooks available, but we used the book with a small whiteboard and did everything orally.

5. Preschool Prep Company Videos.
There are two resources from this company that I found particularly helpful when teaching my young son to read. The first were the Meet the Phonics series videos Meet the Blends and Meet the Digraphs. These two dvds teach blends and digraphs by pronouncing them over cute animated shorts featuring the letters. When I first put them on I never thought my son would be so enthralled by them, but he was and asked for them often. The second resource I found helpful were the Meet the Sight Words dvds. These movies teach 45 words that are very common or can't be sounded out with phonics rules. There is some debate over when and whether teaching sight words is appropriate for young learners. Most people agree that to read fluently children need both an understanding of phonics and some memorization of words. I used sight word memorization and phonics instruction together with no problem. I would probably suggest focusing on phonics first, but for a child who is very eager to read, even these 45 words will allow many more opportunities to do so.

Remember, let your child be your guide. If she asks for a reading lesson, be ready to oblige, but don't push her to finish or get frustrated if she doesn't get something right away. If your child is having trouble putting the letter sounds together into words, take a break and try again in a few weeks. This skill is often something that just "clicks" for kids.

A note about screens: I'm sure someone will have a problem with two of these resources being videos. My family chose to not have tv when my son was a baby, so these educational videos were a very special treat for him. If you're not comfortable with any screen time for young children, then by all means do what you think is best. This is just what worked for our family :)

The Longest Winter

Soooo much snow! We cannot wait to be able to play outside again. Because we live by the ocean, it's often too windy out to enjoy playing outside this time of the year, and we are going stir-crazy! With all that unused energy, it's hard to sit still and focus on school. Right now we are doing a lot of what I call "track school" where Henry runs a circuit through our little house, while I read aloud from a book, ask him to answer math questions, or help him memorize Bible verses or poems. School has also been hard because Henry's little sister has been going through a demanding phase. She seems to want to be physically touching me at every moment of the day. I am looking forward to the time when we can spend an hour or two at the playground again!

Plans for 2014

We are gearing up for an exciting year! We took it easy in Nov. and Dec., went on a vacation for Henry's birthday, visited family down south, and enjoyed Christmas in NJ. We overhauled our whole house, put away the cribs and got the kids into bunk beds, bought a tv for the first time ever, got three new bookshelves (you can never really have enough, right?), and are doing our best to organize the homeschool stuff.

Here are our curriculum choices for the near future:

Math: Rod and Staff 1, skipping parts that are too easy. This is sort of handwriting practice as well, since Henry will be forming the numbers for his answers. I am finally using this very basic, simple curriculum, after struggling with a much cooler, more expensive, and complicated one. I loved the fancy one, but it takes so much prep that we haven't kept up with it. Rod and Staff makes sense and I can open the book and teach every day.

Science: We are still using MFW K themes for science. We took a break from these to do some fun holiday theme stuff, but now we're back into it. Next up, reptiles!

Reading/Spelling: My goal for this year is to have Henry reading independently at the 2nd grade level. He can already read aloud at that level but his comprehension and attention span are still too young for chapter books on his own. I feel like this will probably be something that just occurs naturally, but my plan is to find good books at that level and start reading them to him, and stopping at interesting places to encourage him to pick it up on his own. This is how I taught myself to read as a child and it was honestly just so motivating to want to hear the end of the story. I am still researching more formal phonics/spelling instruction, and I'm considering First Language Lessons and All About Spelling/Reading. I actually bought just the student pages for All About Spelling Levels 3 &4 by mistake a while back, so I only need the teacher's manual and the tiles to make that work. We finished Classical Phonics last year and that plus casual practice has given him a great deal of literacy.

Writing/handwriting: We will use some cheap workbooks for handwriting, as well as lots of games for fine motor skills, coloring, crafts, etc. I am considering ordering a writing/narration program, either writeshop or writing with ease. I am planning on doing some writing projects based on our science/geography subjects.

Geography: Continent boxes, with a focus on one continent at a time.

Almost Four!

I cannot believe my baby is turning four tomorrow! Time has been speeding up lately.

Henry is reading well with books for 2nd or 3rd grade.

He has learned about multiplication and division (from a TV show, I guess?) and loves to do simple math problems. I try to present him with word problems from real life and whenever we are waiting around. We just started talking about negative numbers. I guess will start to work on place values soon, but I sort of want to wait a bit to see if he figures it out on his own before I present him with anyone else's methods.

We are learning about plants (along with a Bible lesson about vines and branches :), and this is the first topic where he seems to really understand the books we're reading. It probably helps that I actually bought the books for this topic from scholastic instead of just collecting whatever we had lying around! Henry actually dug through the learning games to find a "root viewer" activity (a deep pot with a plastic window on one side so you can observe the roots), after we read the books about growing plants. I plan on doing the carnation in colored water experiment and a few others when we get home from our vacation, as well as some leaf crafts. Our next science topic is "Nest", or animal homes, which I think will make a good overview topic for a more complicated animal study I am planning for later in the year. Eventually I want to tie together an animal study with a geographical study/continent boxes. Basically we will study a continent, going through some of the countries and talking about the cultures, etc. While we are reading about that country we will study some animals from that place and classify them on a chart.

The final area I am thinking about is handwriting. I was sure that Henry was either behind in fine motor skills or else too much of a perfectionist to try writing. Every time I suggested he try he refused. Then tonight at dinner he started to do a word puzzle on a restaurant place mat and formed nearly perfect letters. I couldn't believe it! That stinker was holding out on me :) I think I may need to find a good incentive to get him interested in practicing more. We shall see...

Homeschool Update

We've been taking it easy here this year, working on things as we like. My main goals are to progress with reading, writing, and math skills and to focus on Bible and character training. We switched our Bible story and devotion time to just before bed and got Daddy involved, and now our whole family gets to talk and pray together before bed. In an ideal world we'd all be alive enough to do this at breakfast but Mommy is not a morning person :), and the kids are not always the easiest in the morning either.

For the reading we've been practicing reading books that are for second grade, and working our way through the Starfall website's first grade readers just to make sure we aren't skipping any skills. Last year we finished classical phonics which was supposed to cover phonics rules through second grade but I feel like we still could use some practice so I'm not moving further ahead just yet. We are also reading books from the My Father's World kindergarten themes, although I've been mixing them up so that we're reading the ones that interest us.

For math we do starfall, add and subtract objects, play games, quiz each other in the tub. Basically just practice when we feel like practicing.

For writing we just finished the Rod and Staff About Three workbook, which gives lots of fine motor skill practice, and we started the bigger steps workbook which is for four-year-olds. I also have some letter tracing worksheets in page protectors that Henry likes to do with dry erase markers so he can do them over and over again. For fine motor skill practice we do coloring and other crafts every day.

For science we stick to the My Father's World books and activity suggestions, and this is the area that I let slide when we get too busy.