Things I want to remember...

That my boy is MY boy right now. He loves his daddy and is starting to want to do things with just dad, but I'm still the one he wants with him. Although this morning when he was sick at 4 in the morning it was his dad that he called out for, that may have been because the toilet was backing up. I'm not sure if he was just puking he would have called for either of us.

So the second thing is this: I love watching him figure out how to be his own person and stand on his own. In the middle of the night when he was sick he tried (and I wish he hadn't because I would have pulled out the trash can instead of having the clean the carpets but I digress). Last night at scouts we saw it also. 2 years ago, heck even 1 year, he would come up and need us to be with him, last night he played with his friends and raced his boat and only needed us to hold it after his race.

Third thing I want to remember is the way he uses language. I worry so much about his reading ability I lose sight of his verbal skills. He has an amazing vocabulary and really, really is starting to understand how to use it to effect. Last night after scouts I said I was wanting something sweet for a snack. I asked if anyone else wanted something and The Boy said "I think you should tell us what you want and I believe I will concur with you."

All this said today he is laying on the couch under his Nemo blanket he has had since preschool speaking in mono syllables and trying hard not to throw up again.

I'm gonna miss that blanket when he takes it to college with him. 

 

How Homeschool Friendly is your town?

I have become used to the fact that The Boy and I will wander around Brighton and have not a single person bat an eye at us. He is obviously school age and when people ask him if he is enjoying school and his response of I'm homeschooled, is greeted with them again asking if he is enjoying school. Not a batted eye, no looking to me to see if I've suddenly grown a 2nd head, just acceptance and moving on to other conversations we were already having.

This last week we were confronted with 2 different, but both surprised points of view. Neither of these were here in our town. The first was Friday when we were packing my sister up at the hospital so she could go home (Oh, Hey, my sister came home from the hospital again, hopefully for the last time in a very long time) A volunteer came by the room to give everyone a free cup of coffee if they wanted one. (You know I ALWAYS accept free coffee) She sees The Boy in the room and says to him "Why aren't you in school!" He said, "I'm homeschooled" as he always does. She then looked at me as though I had grown not just 1 extra head but maybe 2, or maybe I had grown horns or was a meth addict too lazy to take my child to school, but strong enough to take him to the hospital where I might be able to steal some drugs from my poor defenseless sister. (I might be exaggerating a bit, just a bit, I don't think she felt I had horns) 

The second was at a friend's birthday party, I was talking to another parent and he asked where The Boy goes to school. When I replied we homeschool his response was "Wow, you must be really patient" Ummm, no I'm really not. I am so far from patient it isn't even funny. I will say I am learning to be patient but I did not have it coming in to this.  I wonder about parents who say things like that. Do they say it to explain to themselves why they could never homeschool? I have to admit I don't feel like a real homeschooler. I love my boy I love teaching him but damn I wish I could have some down time. For some reason I have my own misconceptions about this. I think that all other homeschool parents love being with their children all the time, and never have a moment of wishing for something else. In my rational mind I know that isn't true and I know that I can't be the only homeschool mom who is at times driven crazy by the all encompassingness of it all. 

All that to say, I'm lucky with the town we live in. I don't always appreciate it, I often wish I lived somewhere nearer to my family, closer to the city, just somewhere else. This town, though, is very understanding of homeschooling, it takes leaving the comfort of it to understand better the balm that acceptance is. 

Two weeks of school

I started school in a good place, a bit intimidated by the things I was going to teach this year, but ready for it. I had planned 2 weeks out, and the first 2 weeks went by really smoothly. Then we had my sister's surgery and all the appts to get ready for that so the 3rd week of school was actually not much in the way of school. The following week (the week we just finished) went something like this:

I didn't have my lesson plans done so while I definitely know what I'm doing with our reading system and math always just seems to fall out I didn't have things planned for History or Science and so those things fell to the way side, as they always seem to. Sigh. I need to find time this weekend to prep for Barton, and plan 2 weeks out with science and history again. It goes so much more smoothly when I do.

The Boy is still HATING the Barton system but I have begun to use bribes and they are working. If he will do the hour of tutoring without arguing and complaining then he will get a small reward. I don't even remember what it was last week but it worked and we got through a lesson without my having to stop the timer or screaming at him. The funny/not so funny thing was when we were talking about this he pantomimed our normal exchange exactly. From his complaining about not wanting to do something to my fists clenched explanation of why he must.do.this.thing. Heh.

All that said  he read something out loud to me, voluntarily, with no tears over words he couldn't read, just asked me to fill them in. It was wonderful and made up for the horrible feeling I felt in the grocery store where I saw a book on George Washington that was obviously for his age level and the reading level was 3.2 and while he SHOULD be able to read that he is no where near able to read at that level. He will get there it will be fine. Someday I'll look back on this and laugh at my worries. Right? Right? Please tell me I'm right.

In news of my sister she is feeling better in some ways but is on her way back to the hospital because she is leaking spinal fluid. Please keep her in your thoughts as they work on getting her better.

Thank you.

The advantage of Homeschool

This week, oh my, this week. We have done nothing that is part of our curriculum. Learning has happened but it has been an education of brain anatomy, surgery procedures, hospital procedures,improvised games, and empathy.

One week ago my sister was given Thursday Sept 1st as an appt for brain surgery. Monday we took her to an appt with her General Practitioner and The Boy learned about the anatomy of the stomach and what a stomach with an ulcer looked like, not because his Auntie has anything like this but because  they had models of this in the room.

Tuesday he learned what the Arachnoid Mater looks like at the neurosurgeon's office. He learned where the brain stem is, what some of the side effects of surgery were. Why it was better to have the surgery than not. What the expected benefits of the surgery would be. Why you want a surgeon who doesn't choose surgery as the first option. He also learned the first bit of the hospital, where the cafeteria is, where the bathrooms are, that it is easy to forget your dog when you have so much else on your mind. (Oh wait that was my lesson not his)

On Wednesday he learned that sometimes you have to let plans go when others can't keep up. That a headache can't always be made to go away with Mama's hug (although she will try)

On Thursday he learned that you can wait for long hours for information when you love someone and they are in surgery. He learned that it helps to have family around you while you wait and to have family greet you when you get out of surgery.

On Friday he is learning that it is better to have to wait to see a nurse in ICU because you are doing so well rather than have the nurses hovering. He is learning that ICU is not a place with a lot of joy but there is hope and again having family and friends around helps to ease the pain.

If he had been in a public school he would not have seen this, I would not have been able to just be here for my sister, my brother in law, and my parents. It has been crazy and worrying and busy, but it has also been wonderful to have family together and seeing that my sister is less than 24 hours out of surgery and already her symptoms that have ruled her life for the last 16 years are gone. Modern medicine is an amazing and wonderful thing.

Week 2 down...

Yeah, the joy of the first week was gone. The acceptance of the Barton system was GONE. There were tears and melt downs, and no they weren't mine.(pththtth) At one point The Boy cried that he just wanted to be NORMAL and be able to read without the 'stupid' Barton system. Sigh. I wish I could find the magic wand that would make it all easier.

We finished up the papyrus this week and I'll post pictures of it next week. I think he has figured out what he wants to write on it. The names of each of us and our last name in hieroglyphs.  That should be really fun.

We finished up Level one of Barton in 2 weeks (4 lessons), and now I have to study up to start Level 2. We'll start up next Monday and it may be just about the only lessons we do next week. We have a lot of things coming up next week and I'm think school is going to be pretty light. I want to get something knit for my sister in that time also.

I guess that means next week there will be actual knitting content on my knitting blog. Who would have thought.

The First Week is done...

and we survived.

Actually, we more than survived we soared. It was so much fun. Also, so much harder.

The Barton System is great, and I can see exactly where he is having problems processing sounds. It is interesting to see it broken down. (the following explanation will make more sense if you know now that C is consonants and V is vowel, I only mention it because I didn't get it at first) He can easily hear CV or VC combos, also VCC or CCV. Where he can't seem to decode is VCV, that middle vowel sound loses him every time. It is interesting to watch because we will fly through some lessons and then once we hit that it takes forever. He makes up the most interesting stories about the non-sense words and they get more and more detailed the more VCV words I make him try to compare or decode. Tomorrow I will be giving Barton a call and see if they can give me an idea of more VCV practice for him.

I also received The Dyslexia Advantage yesterday, so now I have a new book to read. It is fascinating reading. Helps keep me balanced on what I'm seeing in him.  There is an advantage to this challenge and I really want to help him see it. Our hardest moment this week was during the second Barton lesson when he broke down crying that he is dyslexic and he CAN'T read, and will never be able to. It broke my heart, but I know it is partly because he has never had to work this hard before. I have tried to teach him reading before but it felt like flailing about for both of us where this I can see clearly where he is having problems and we can work on building his ear up to hear the sounds and breaking them down slowly.

Something I never noticed that both F & I do and I know The Boy's previous teachers did was add the 'uhhh' sound to the end of the B, D, V sounds, actually and short hard consonant sound. It really impedes the ability to sound out a word if you are trying to sound out bit and you are saying buh-i-t. It also makes it hard to spell a word like 'but' if you sound it out and you hear buh and t sound, after all the word should then be spelled bt right? He HATES being corrected on the letter sounds. We are working through our issues though. ;)

Science was a JOY this week. We went to the stinky, dirty, trashy pond by our house and took samples of the water. Saw frogs, minnows, dragonflies, duckweed, algae, and so many other things. We also came home and looked under the microscope at the samples. So much fun.

Gathering samples of duckweed, algae, tadpoles, and snails.

We have decided that Fridays will be our field trip days and this week we went to Barr Lake with my lovely sister. It was so nice to spend the day with her. We were eaten by mosquitoes, saw a bunny, lots of insects, tracks of many animals and had so much fun. We will be going back to the Fall Birding Festival out there. I took my Canon Rebel film camera, need to get the pics developed, gave Sis my digi camera and The Boy had his own. It is fun to see the different pictures taken from different perspectives.

Very nice gentleman asked if we wanted him to take our picture so we did. 

Bunny picture taken by The Boy

Picture of me I don't hate, also by The Boy.

Another bunny picture by The Boy.

Oriole nest by The Boy.

Grasshopper by The Boy

The Boy, by Mama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milkweed seed pod, by The Boy.

So apparently I don't have any pictures taken by my Sis loaded up. I'll have to put them in another post.

We are studying Egypt again this year. He choose Egypt and Rome to study this year, I think mainly because we have been reading the Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan and he wants to study the history of the stories we are seeing in that. Hey whatever it takes. He is a little annoyed that he already knows much of the Egyptian history since we studied it 2 years ago but he is liking some of the extra stuff I've added in. We are making papyrus paper this year, it is a multi-day process but he isn't annoyed with it and still wants to work on it.

It has to soak, then be pressed, then soaked again, then pressed again, then soaked again, etc...

I think he will be happier with the history portion once we move on to Roman history. I want to try to make an arch when we get to that point. We'll see.  We still need to make a mummified chicken for the Egypt portion this year. Dreading/excited about it. I'm thinking the shed is going to be a very good mummification chamber. Also have 3 sarcophagi to make.

Math is fine, it is the easy portion of our day. I keep trying to find ways to get him to memorize his times tables but I'm just not sure how much I'm going to press it. It is one of the weaknesses that come hand in hand with dyslexia and I really do see the benefit of learning them by rote but I'm not sure that this is the year to fight that battle. I will have him work on Rocket Math on the iPad and Timez Attack on the PC each day but I think I want the hard mental work to go towards reading this year and maybe next year we will work on times tables. I also want to see if I can find a narrative way to introduce them so he will have a personal memory to tie to the numbers. See, using a strength of dyslexia to overcome a weakness. Still I need to find the time to locate such a thing or try to create it myself.

I find it really satisfying to pull his curriculum from lots of sources but I will say it is a lot of work. This year I'm trying to get a bit more focused on what we are doing, I think in part because this is the year we will be giving him the standardized test for the state. Plus he is getting older and is now in 'upper elementary' he is no where near ready to 'read to learn' as opposed to 'learn to read' that is suppose to take place in this year of school but we are working on it and we will get there, I know it.


My dream right now is to get the loft area of our house pulled together to hold our school stuff. All the books, a special place for the library books we borrow. A desk for me to work on my lesson plans as well as the work I do for a friend. I don't see us actually doing school work in the space often but I see it being a place for me to plan for the week and a place to store all the 'stuff' that comes with school that right now resides on the dining room table and the living room couch. It is making me antsy and plus I'm certain I'm going to forget some FABULOUS resource I've found at some point and forgotten about because it is buried.

The Winner announced

So I ended up getting distracted by first the insurance adjuster on Friday then IKEA on Saturday. Luckily Sunday seems to be for relaxing, while The Boy makes pancakes for the 'whole family' this means he made special pancakes for Honey, the dog. ;)

Anyway I did get around to having the Boy pick the winner and that would be V.S. I'm glad it will help with the kiddos schooling this year.

Tomorrow starts school and this weekend I started knitting The Boy wooly socks for this winter/camping, meaning I should have more fodder for the blog and actually won't be whining about 'female issues' anymore. Yippee. (I do however have one more blog post about that in me so don't feel safe yet David.)