Week ending February 20

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Permalink Reply by Hidden Jewel on February 20, 2009 at 11:09pm

I started dd12 with AAS level one this week. She wasn't too thrilled but we had a talk about how the goal was to be able to have effective communication both orally and written. The pieces to meeting that goal included spelling correctly. So she has been very mature about the lessons for which I am very thankful. She should finish level 1 by Tuesday and then we will probably be doing one step per day on level 2.

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Permalink Reply by Deborah on February 20, 2009 at 11:41pm

Well, other than really getting into AAS and missing SLT this week, we had a pretty standard week. I am extremely happy with how my autistic son is doing with AAS. He finished Step 1 of Level 1 this week and will soon be done with Step 2. For a child with severe language delays, that's great. (I had already done some phonics with him.) I can also see that AAS will work well for him. Having the color-coded tiles will help him distinguish vowels from consonants -- something I don't think I could explain to him just verbally. Having a very incremental yet thorough approach that does not have embedded expectations of moving at a standard pace is also very helpful. I also don't have to omit or greatly alter the program to use it. It also doesn't seem to require more language skills than he currently has. All in all, I expect him to do well with this program.

My son is also an enthusiastic Cub Scout and is looking forward to the Blue & Gold this weekend. Me, I am not looking forward to the cake auction.

Deborah

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Permalink Reply by Merry on February 21, 2009 at 1:06am

Hey, we went to a children's museum yesterday & the kids and I tapped out messages to each other in Morse code! That was a lot of fun!

We only schooled 3 days this week with the holiday Monday & then my son's birthday yesterday (well, I could probably count those 3 hours at the museum, I forgot that!).

I ordered some books tonight to read up more on dyslexia & learning disabilities, so I'm excited to get those.

I've been looking at tons of LA stuff for next year--I'm getting closer to knowing what I want but haven't decided yet.

DD today thought the letter E came right before U in the alphabet, until we sang the song--she was forgetting the /t/ sound of the letter T! Talk about struggling with arbitrary sequences!

I'm seeing the need to increase our review as we get into more vowel teams, so I want to think on that this weekend.

Merry :-)

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Permalink Reply by wen on February 21, 2009 at 5:41am

Merry, which books did you order?

We went ice skating with our co-op yesterday and my ds who attends the local high school had a half day on Thursday so we only had school 3 1/2 days. We finished our unit on WWII and we're getting ready to start learning about the Cold War, I'm excited because a lot of it will be new for me too.

We're on lesson 4 of level 2. My teen needs a ton of review so we're splitting the lessons into 2 sessions. One for review and one for the current lesson.

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Permalink Reply by Merry on February 21, 2009 at 11:46am

Hi Wen,

I ordered on recommendation:

"The Mislabeled Child: Looking Beyond Behavior to Find the True Sources and Solutions for Children's Learning Challenges"

and I ordered on a whim:
"Learning Disabilities: A to Z: A Parent's Complete Guide to Learning Disabilities from Preschool to Adulthood"

The latter book I saw at some point while I was looking at a bunch of other books and decided to take a chance on it! It sounds good, I hope it is.

I had planned on ordering Overcoming Dyslexia as I've heard it recommended several times, but when I read the comments on it, people seemed to think it was more theory/philosopy/science behind dyslexia rather than solutions, and I wanted something to have more focus on helpful teaching strategies. So I might inter-library loan that one some time if I still want to read it after I read these other two.

So, if you do one whole session as review with your teen, what does that look like? Are you dictating word cards & the other cards the whole time?

Thanks, Merry :-)

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Permalink Reply by wen on February 23, 2009 at 6:52am

Merry, When we do our review section, I basically run through all the cards behind the review tabs. I show him the phonogram cards and he says the sounds, I read the key cards and he answers. Then we're doing oral spelling for review words, this has always been a struggle but it really makes him focus. We're only at the early stage of level 2 so I may need to adjust this later but for now it's working.(we do a lot of syllable division work as part of his reading lessons).

I'm only homeschooling 1 now(was 4 at one time) so I can be a lot more flexible with our schedule.

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Permalink Reply by Robin E. on February 21, 2009 at 8:01pm

This week was another busy one for us, although thankfully not as busy as last week's. February and March are our busiest times of year, with 4H gearing up for the county fair the first week of April and other events and activities taking advantage of the beautiful weather and large population of winter visitors (or snow birds as we call them).

Monday was a holiday for DH so, since we had just gotten out tax return, we did a LOT of shopping. We were gone (yes, with all 5 kids in tow) from 9:30 to 3:00. Then Tuesday evening was the 4H Favorite Foods contest, where the kids make a dish, but (as usual in 4H) it is much more complicated than that. Anyway, all Tuesday afternoon was dedicated to getting ready for that contest (although they had done some of the work the week before too) and all Tuesday evening was spent there. Only Lily and Jude participated, but the whole family had a good time. Wednesday and Thursday were normal days for us (seems the first back to back in a long time) and I finally was able to start AAS with Lily. She completed 4 steps in those two days, and we kept the lessons quite short. Then Friday Caleb took part in the county wide Math Counts competition with our homeschool support group team. They competed against 8 middle schools, and finished somewhere in the middle. BTW, 3 hours of watching ~50 kids take math tests is pretty boring, but the forth hour was head to head oral competition and THAT was pretty exciting. The sponsors (an engineer organization, I'm a little sad I can't remember their organization name) then bought pizza for everyone. The boys on our team all agreed their hard work was worth it and are already talking about next year.

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Permalink Reply by siloam on February 24, 2009 at 12:30pm

Last week was OK. Didn't get half of what I was hoping done, so we are taking this week off too. That ended up being a good choice because the kiddo's all have a head cold and are extra grouchy. ;)

At this point I am still working on Spring cleaning and on reading through Homer. I am almost done with the LA part but I sill have the whole writing section to read.

Heather

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