Monday, August 07, 2006

A New School Year

Well, we started school today. The kids told me they were bored one time too many, so we started school. They weren't bored today!

Unfortunately, I woke up at 4:30am with an impressive migraine - EEK! The good news is that I hadn't scheduled a lot of stuff to do, so we were able to get it all done. I have been cataloguing all of our educational CD-ROMS, videos, and DVDs, so I can give them work to do when I have a bad headache. But, today went pretty well, and I'm encouraged. The "real" schoolbooks are actually still in boxes. I did math drill sheets and dictation from Harry Potter and stuff like that today.

We're also working out who does what jobs around the house. I'm not sure how we're going to work out who does dishes on what night. We still have to see what the dance, AWANA, worship team, and Junior High schedules look like.

P and I spent Saturday really organizing and unpacking boxes. The craft room is now just a messy room and not a major disaster site! The school room is completely organized, except for not having the bookshelves filled. We have 6 unopened boxes of books in the living room right now along with a bunch of boxes and several shelves of stuff in a storage unit. A good bit of that stuff is going to have to go right to Goodwill. There is no way we have room for it here. But, the school books are somewhere in all that!

C read for me today. I was hoping that in the couple of months that we haven't done formal reading that he might have made some developmental gains. Unfortunately, things have gotten no better. He can read simple three letter words by themselves most of the time. He can get them all the time if they are paired with pictures. But, he had real problems reading a simple story. On one page, he read the word "fall" without trouble, but he had no clue what the same word was on the next page. He could get the "f" sound, but nothing else. He read the word "into" as "in". Even when I pointed it out to him, he still could not see that he was missing half the word! His eyesight can't be that much of an issue: these words were very large on a computer screen. He asks for help when he can't differentiate a "b" from a "d". The issues he is having in reading right now are not that clearcut. The good news is that a friend who is a reading specialist is supposed to come in a week or two to help me decide what the next step is. Clearly, we need some new directions. I think I'm going to try some letter blocks tomorrow and see if that helps him at all.

P gave his 2 week notice at his job last week. He will be meeting this week with a professor of a program that gets people with bachelor's degrees in math and science the education they need to be able to teach high school. This is pretty exciting for him. He will probably not need to take any math classes, but should be able to go right to education method classes. He's hoping that he can actually be working within 1 1 /2 to 2 years. In any case, it's pretty exciting for him.

Well, I'm off to try out more of my kids' math software and figure out what works for them and what doesn't. Tomorrow we're doing school at the coffee shop!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Catherine,
About the reading, my ds couldn't read or spell worth beans in 2nd grade (he was in public school at that time). But somehow by the end of 3rd he was reading college level text books. I think part of it was maturity, and they just started really working on his phonics with him and sending book like the "Bob" books home to practice.
Hope your feeling better today.
I really do enjoy your blog.
Donna M.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at the Wilson Language reading system yet but the website is www.wilsonlanguage.com. Specifically, there is a section that talks about what their target customer is: http://www.wilsonlanguage.com/w_wrs.htm

The woman who recommended this reading system used this with her son, who has dyslexia, as well as special need students that she currently works with. She said that this particular method will "cure" C of his reading difficulty. She said that her son has to work 3 times as hard to read as those without dyslexia, but....he can read. Her son now owns and operates a very successful computer business here in Atlanta. E loved the reading blocks (we used Reading Rods)----that's when the silent e and digraphs really made sense to him. And that's exciting news about P and his new venture!
Kimberly