Good Ideas

My notes are in parentheses.
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From Theresa at Lapaz Farm Learning:

Mat Learning
(I was going to work on mats with my littlies but realize I have a shortage of mat-type toys.... so right now it's just carpet containment of the big toys like the duplo set, and teaching them to pick up afterwards -- they are doing so much better with that! I've also collected a few things that might work as mats. SO progress, but no pictures or wonderful results yet)
Fishers of Men
(Along with Kieron's happy reception of the book Faerie Queen as a new reader today, Theresa's method of planning a Lenten theme gave me some ideas for a Lenten theme for him based on knights/quests -- details to follow, hopefully)
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From Helen at Castle of the Immaculate

Leading the Little Ones to Mary
and update
(I have Leading the Little Ones but could never think of a way to use it with my kids )
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From Donna Marie at A Garden of Roses and Lilies

Hands-On Monday
(I love the way she described the day and the variety in the projects with her family of several)
Illumination: A Liturgical Art in Progress
(I have been collecting resources on illumination so this is timely!)
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From Tracy at Magnolia Cul-de-Sac

Homemade Figures
(OH! and I have some wooden clothespins! )

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Also, I collected some ideas for Lenten calendars and other odds and ends from other blogs at my Liturgical Year Notebook.
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If there's a general point to this post it's that I love the creativity evidenced in making do with what's on hand -- and making something beautiful for God.
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Lenten Reading

For Lent I've been reading this book:
Living Water: An Anthology of Letters of Direction
I'm not even sure where we got it originally; it's been around our house for a long time. It has a rather eclectic list of authors from Aelred of Rievaulx to Carlo Carretto to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Brother Lawrence to the Abbe de Tourville.


The book is divided into topics like:

1. Openness to God and the Self
2. Self-Abandonment to God
3. Self-Acceptance
4. Prayer and Contemplation
5. Encountering Darkness
6. The Rhythm of Everyday Life
7. On Various Sort and Conditions
8. The Vision of God

I've also been reading Revelations of Divine Mercy: Daily Readings from the Diary of Blessed Faustina Kowalska

This one is divided into topics by month. You can see the Table of Contents here.

I am one of those people who like to rush through books at full tilt. So reading these books in bits and pieces is a penance for me in itself. I'm hoping that the slower pace will allow me to assimilate the wisdom a bit more thoroughly.

Time for Taking Care of Yourself?

I really enjoy the blog My Simpler Life and this post really struck me:
Reason #6 to simplify your life: Your health is being neglected.

If you don’t have time to maintain the body you have, you are doing too much. You can’t just drop your health and think that there will be no future consequences. You know there will be - you just don’t want to look that far ahead. And there are consequences right now - getting sick more often, being tired a lot, getting headaches, heartburn and stomach aches.

You don’t have to have the perfect body. You just need to care at least minimally for what’s been given to you - exercising 3 times a week, eating mostly right, getting enough sleep, brushing and flossing and getting your checkups.

My life is not that complicated, really. Yet still these things seem to end up in last place on my priority list. I wonder why that is? Can it be that if I have time to eat well and exercise, my guilt triggers tell me that I'm not busy enough?

Hmm... something to think about this Lent.

Links

• This is a nice site with a scriptural rosary you can download, and a free illustrated e-book of the rosary.

• Also, I have just printed out the pages at Catholic Culture on Preschool Pedagogy -- there is a lot of information on starting out teaching the faith to a little one, and following the liturgical year in a simple way.
  

Sensory Integration

Very helpful post from Aut2BHome in Carolina

Round-Up

Two from JoVE:

Career/Life Planning

One of the bad things about school and its relentless sequential model is that kids are asked as soon as they become teens to make decisions about what they want to do when they grow up and then told that the course choices they make in the next few years are going to be crucial in reaching that goal. This puts a whole lot of pressure on teens at a time in their life when, quite frankly, they don’t need it.

Also, Quoting the Cheshire Cat

(also about career choices and planning, and also perspective on life after forty)

Math Success from Eide Neuro-Learning blog

Some key differences between Asian and non-Asian math learning:

• –emphasis on conceptual thinking
• –family motivation and study habits
• – knowing the math facts.

Meta-Cognitive Strategies

Contemplation &Connections& Hearts

I loved Cindy at Dominion Family's recent posts on homeschooling:

Why I Believe Homeschooling is the Best Option part 1
Why I Believe Homeschooling is the Best Option part 2

Among other things, she says (emphasis mine):

It occurs to me that one of the main arguments for starting community schools is that they are efficient. Why have 20 moms teaching Latin when one teacher will do? I personally believe the efficiency argument will not hold up because if we are going to argue for efficiency we will have to start arguing against the classical model altogether. Many classical educators espouse agrarianism because it speaks their language. Efficiency is the destructive god of our day not the key to the hearts and minds of students in the classical model. This very efficiency is what makes the school setting unyielding. Contemplation is lost among the wheels of efficiency.

This is a wonderful way of putting it. It is close to some of the things John Senior says in his very thought-provoking Restoration of Christian Culture. She mentions agrarianism and I could think of several more examples:

• Cooking just for one family is inefficient, when restaurants (MacDonald's, anyone?) can feed a multitude.
• A mom caring for her own preschoolers is inefficient, when a childcare facility could care for several children at the same time.
• Small businesses are inefficient, compared to big corporations which can produce a reliable product at little expensive.
• Breastfeeding is inefficient in terms of expended time and energy when compared with professionally formulated and prepared formula and accessories.
  
• A handmade product is inefficient because one person is spending all that time working when a factory could turn out lots of more standardized things in less time.
• Christ's public ministry in a small obscure section of the Roman Empire was inefficient, compared to a televangelist who can reach millions.

The point is that an argument of efficiency as the standard rests on an equivocation of efficiency with effectiveness, which are two very different things and can in fact work at cross-purposes.

When Aidan was in the NICU, nurses told me time and time again how a baby who was discharged, once the medical crisis was past, would just flourish at home, even though home was more casual and, well, messy and amateurish. This was true even with kids who went home needing nursing-level care. The nurses could give careful, thorough, efficient medical and human care and keep a baby alive but they couldn't provide the conditions that made a baby thrive and flourish and become his own unique self. They didn't make the mistake of thinking that efficiency was anything but a strategic necessity in certain circumstances, most often a second-best necessity.

Cindy linked to a blog which links to all the articles which came up in the course of the conversation (and it was nice of Cindy to mention my blogs too : )).
Among other things, the post says:

It also seems to me that it is rarely if ever pointed out that what is efficient for the teachers and administrators is terribly inefficient -- for the student.

I think this is so true. To use another healthcare example -- one dark moment in Paddy's 3 week NICU stay was when a nurse told me she was going to give Paddy an OG feeding (threading a feeding tube into his mouth into his stomach and then letting the formula drip into him). She was busy and didn't want to have to go to the trouble of rearranging his tubes and disposing him so that I could bottlefeed him, even though I was right there. (The subsequent details have faded from my mind but I do believe I ended up feeding him and I am absolutely certain that this was the last time this nurse was assigned to my son. Also, I will add that this was an isolated negative experience and most of my nurse experiences were much more along the line of professionals trying to do the best they could to support the baby and the baby's family).

Charlotte Mason says that "much teaching hinders learning" and so while I do think there is lots of room for a homeschool to grow and develop, I don't think the model to follow is "efficiency".

I don't think schools are always bad. I'm reading David Copperfield right now and there is a nice contrast between a really poor school and a very decent and effective school. But there, I think that the key is not efficiency, but as this article says, something more like subsidiarity -- where the schools are a support and furtherance of the parents' educational goals, not a substitute or sort of dilution of them in the name of efficiency.

Speaking (however indirectly) of what homeschooling is about and about connecting to hearts and minds, I liked this post at The Common Room: Connections. I've been waiting for a chance to pull it in somewhere:

One day about three years ago we went for a long walk
through our woods. On our walk my then 7 and 5 year olds were sharing the connections they were making, and also showing me that studies do serve for delight, and that education is the science of relations.=) Our five year old told me that the woods made him think of Little House in the Big Woods. We found a large tree fallen over a stream outlet, and the top was hollowed out, making a space large enough for two small children to play in. They told me they were Vikings like Harald, only nicer. We found a pile of red fur and one of them wondered if it belonged to Reddy Fox (from one of Thornton Burgess' books). They played Pooh sticks at the bridge. Our five year old found a hollow in the base of the tree and explained to us that this was one of the animal homes with a place for a door in it for animal visitors to knock on (ala Beatrix Potter)

This is very close to the heart of what I want for my children, though most days are an approximation and sometimes I don't see the evidence of the connections till much later. It takes time -- leisure -- and thought and imagination. It is not systematically efficient, it can't be written out tidily in a lesson plan, but it's real and it works (like these heart cookies, which I can't resist linking to since I hope to make them tomorrow, uh, today, actually)

Literature Themes -- Real Learning

Elizabeth is taking suggestions for the revised booklist in the second edition of Real Learning.

What follows here is an old post sharing how I used the Real Learning booklist for a couple of years, back when my older kids were in 8th, 6th and 5th grades and following. It worked for us well. I am posting it here just in case the method happens to be helpful for anyone else. It's not pure Charlotte Mason (because we moved through the books at more of a Sonlight pace) or pure unit study but something in between, I guess, with a strong literature-based component.
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My 8th grader at this time was following a chronology-based approach --using The Story of the Church (a Catholic church history survey) and a lot of saints' bios -- and he just read through the 8th grade part of the booklist pretty much straight (depending on which books we had around the house or could find at the library) without really having them be part of his "school curriculum". It was just his nighttime reading program, and gave him some variety. A slightly more methodical way to do it would be to consult the research resources mentioned in the booklist: the Kingfisher History book for the time period mentioned (or the Kingfisher Science if it was a science-based month), write a book narration and an illustrated history page, and in that way compile a Book of Centuries and Nature Notebook of the child's own. Not much work required for mom, and over a few years you cover pretty much every area.

Here's the long version of what we did with a sixth and fifth grader (mostly using the sixth year of the booklist:

I used a history program called ABCs of Christian Culture (from Our Father's House) very loosely as a spine for history studies. It has you cycle through world history every year, but focus every year on different periods. Eg one year you might pay attention more to ancient history, one year to High Middle Ages, and so on. Continuity is provided by extensive use of a timeline or century book and by map studies (You could do the same thing by using Kingfisher World History, or Usborne's World History, or Hillyer's A CHild's History of the World, as a background). The main principle is that people learn not by memorizing facts, but by understanding relationships.

Charlotte Mason would, of course, agree with this principle. And this was how we approached the book list; as a way to focus on the details of the big picture. Whenever we went from one theme to the next -- say, Middle Ages to Shakespeare -- we would consult a broad-view timeline and do some mapwork that showed the big picture -- Europe in this case. Then we'd do a more close-focus map and timeline of the particular period. I usually chose a non-fiction book (sometimes a saints' biography, sometimes an Usborne or Landmark book, or sometimes we just used the Kingfisher World History or the encyclopedia) to read alongside with that month's literature.

The themes that were science or author -based would let us put history on the back burner for a month while we concentrated more on natural history or on literary themes. Again, I'd pick out a context book -- like a biography of the author, or a science text or encyclopedia. And sometimes
this would lead to a longterm interest that would continue after the month was over. My daughter is still reading horse books, for example, and has pretty much cleaned out the library by this point.

The basic formula I would use was to choose one book I felt was appropriate for a read-aloud per month, then find a non-fiction book about the same topic (or just use the Kingfisher World History). The first month we did the early middle ages, then the High Middle Ages from 6th grade, then we did the Shakespeare study -- then after a break in December we branched out on a multicultural study using the Japan and China months and adding Trumpeter of Krakow for a look at eastern Europe. We finished off by doing the World War II months and it was really interesting to see how the multicultural themes connected to the WWII themes, since of course Poland and Japan were big parts of the war.


When we went from reading Shakespeare in November to reading Samurai's Tale in January, the time frame was almost the same -- the 1500's -- but of course, the location was entirely different. The same was true when we went from Japan to Renaissance Poland (in "Trumpeter of Krakow"). The time was the same, but the different location gave us a chance to brush up on eastern European geography -- very helpful when we started in on WWII.


If interest in the theme for that month was high with my kids, they'd race through all the books on the list for that month and ask for more. This was true of the Middle Ages and World War II -- for the Middle Ages my daughter designed her own study of Don Quixote, and for WWII my son is still studying military aircraft. Some of the themes didn't "take" quite as much and we didn't use the whole list of books for that month, but they still do remember a fair amount of what they learned -- eg with Shakespeare and Japan. This is consistent with what Charlotte Mason says about providing a broad and generous curriculum, and one child finding his "meat" in Plato and another in Peter Pan.

So we did go on trails when there was a continuing interest, but the themed groupings helped us to have a place to go back to when the trail came to an end.

Another benefit I found, that I could not have predicted at the beginning of the year, was that we made our own connections during the study -- not just historical/geographical connections but literary ones. Trumpeter of Krakow and Samurai's Tale were both about courage against great odds, but one was a thoroughly Christian background and the other was an Oriental point of view. It was so interesting to compare the two.

Needs with Price Tags

I liked the Opus Dei message for the end of January -- Don't create needs for yourself.

In any event, all we need do is listen to the words of Our Lord: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’

If you want to achieve this spirit, I would advise you to be sparing with yourself while being very generous towards others. Avoid unnecessary expenditure on luxuries and comforts, whether out of caprice, or vanity, etc. Don’t create needs for yourself. In other words, learn from St Paul ‘to live in poverty and to live in abundance, to be filled and to be hungry, to live in plenty and to live in want: I can do all things in him who comforts me’. Like the Apostle, we too will come out winners in this spiritual combat if we keep our hearts unattached and free from ties. (Friends of God, 123-124)

I didn't notice how much I was looking for outside solutions (with a price tag) for various "needs" in my life until I started focusing on the abundance already in my home. I have been trying since last December to make do with what I have as much as possible.

My temptation isn't so much to buy luxuries for myself. My temptation is to spend money on the homeschool, on "bargains" at thrift stores, on little things for the household that we can easily do without. So instead of that, I've been digging through closets and under bed storage to find what we DO have and use that instead of the neat item I would like to buy.

I read a book written by a dad of a large family, once; he talked about his wife "shopping under the bed", meaning that she went and looked through their stored things and brought them out to use. I thought that could widen out into a philosophy of life.... often, by waiting for something or looking for it around you instead of immediately starting to strategize to acquire it, you find a sort of serendipitous effect. Sometimes. It doesn't have to be universal. But sometimes, it's nicer to wait, and more productive of gratitude when the thing does come.

"Child-Garden" and special needs

In reading Charlotte Mason's Home Education, I was struck with how much her words about "Kindergarten" echoes Joan Goodman's critique of Early Intervention centers in the book When Slow is Fast Enough. After writing the post about my plans for Aidan's curriculum, I went and looked for the book on my parenting/educational shelf.

Here's a quote from Charlotte Mason:

Teachers mediate too much.––There are still, probably, Kindergartens where a great deal of twaddle is talked in song and story, where the teacher conceives that to make poems for the children herself and to compose tunes for their singing and to draw pictures for their admiration, is to fulfil her function to the uttermost. The children might echo Wordsworth's complaint of 'the world,' and say, the teacher is too much with us, late and soon. Everything is directed, expected, suggested. No other personality out of book, picture, or song, no, not even that of Nature herself, can get at the children without the mediation of the teacher. No room is left for spontaneity or personal initiation on their part.

(she goes on to say, talking about Helen Keller's teacher:)

Miss Sullivan had little love for psychologists and all their ways; would have no experiments; would not have her pupil treated as a phenomenon, but as a person.

"No," she says, "I don't want any more Kindergarten materials . . . I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think, whereas if the child is left to himself he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things, and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences."

Compare this with When Slow is Fast Enough:

When children do poorly a teacher has several options: she can withdrawn her efforts, simplify the objective, or give more help. Teachers, eager to increase children's performances, react to failure by trying to "help" more. ..... The only way teachers can further help the inattentive, error-ridden child who has not responded to coaching or answer-shparing, is to dominate the action..... The problem of teacher play is that when there is no "take" there is also no continuity; the children look impressive only while the teacher dominates the play.

(An example): It is first thing in the morning, and a teacher invites a few children to play with her until the others arrive. She constructs a roadway that goes under a tunnel as it approaches the airport. She has one child zoom an airplane overhead, a second one move a car along the road. Then she has them crash. A third child is instructed to bring the ambulance and take the car passengers quickly to the hospital. The children play out their roles with lots of coaching, and the teacher is animated and enthusiastic; but when she leaves, all the children dispers.

There are many, many more similar examples in the book; all of them seemed almost designed to illustrated the points that Charlotte Mason and Anne Sullivan were making.

One more:

David is asked if an apple is round or squre. He responds, "Apple gives us A," and Austin chimes in, "Apple juice is good for you." Neither child has absorbed the question. On repetition, David says, "Square." This failure is a clue for Stephen, so that whether or not he knows the right answer, he offers the remaining alternative.

This is a bit about "distorting children's intentions":

When Molly leaves circle during "weather," crawls under a table, and removes her sneaker, Teresa (teacher) says to Anita (assistant), "Molly wants you to help her sit." As Teresa knows full well.... Molly wants to be freed from, not helped in, sitting. When Heather "falls out" because Anita stops her from grabbing juice, she yells, "Gimme my juice. I want my juice." Teresa replies, "I guess Heather isn't ready for juice yet. Maybe she will be more ready after some quiet time."

The point is that the teachers want to adopt a friendly, harmonious atmosphere but the method they use is not exactly honest. Goodman also points out that commands are often disguised as compliments: "Good sitting," means "keep sitting, don't get up." Truly, everything is directed; suggested; expected. Goodman goes into more of the reasons WHY this is the case in Early Intervention and how the clash between the expectations of the "kindergarten-readiness" curriculum and the reality of the delayed children's level and needs often lead to these kinds of situations. She does not think that EI is wrong in itself; she thinks that it is too often basically unsuccessful in its methods and that this is because the set-up is based on teaching principles that aren't proven to be sound.

Plans for Aidan Year 0

For Aidan, who is age 7 and functions about on a 4-5 year old level, I am presently using these resources:

• Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
• Child-Sized Masterpieces
• Various poetry, song and prayer resources
  
• Bible Stories and Ambleside Year 0-type books.
  
• Handwriting without Tears.
• A math worktext (used as a spine and a sort of visual picture book of math)

We are extremely flexible. His motivation to learn is excellent; so when he is unfocused I take it as a developmental issue rather than a discipline problem. My primary goal is to build attention since as CM says it is the prerequisite for many moral and intellectual habits.

She mentions extending a baby's or toddler's attention: "the baby, notwithstanding his wonderful powers of observation, has no power of attention; in a minute, the covered plaything drops from listless little fingers, and the wandering glance lights upon some new joy. But even at this stage the habit of attention may be trained: the discarded plaything is picked up, and, with 'Pretty!' and dumb show, the mother keeps the infant's eyes fixed for fully a couple of minutes––and this is her first lesson in attention."

I haven't thought of it as "lessons", but this is the sort of thing that can easily be worked into day to day life. My mother in law, without even having heard of CM as far as I know, is a natural at this -- making things fresh and new again by some very spontaneous type of gesture to encourage that little bit of extra attention. Aidan's older siblings also do this quite naturally in the course of playing and interacting with him.

Anyway, it's become second nature for me to find the very slight stretch that's beyond Aidan's "natural" attention span but to move to something else before he is squirming and over-pressured. I'm not saying I always get it exactly right, but it's a habit for me now to TRY, anyway!

Now to the specifics:

Bible & Literature:

We have a book of very simple Bible stories and I don't expect narrations, just attention. I extend his attention by interacting with the text and with him. We do the Five in a Row approach -- not extra activities, at least not yet, but repeating the same story as many times as he is still interested in hearing it. In the end he knows the story by heart and can repeat sections and make connections to other contexts which is the closest he is yet to a narration.

This is the same approach we use for his literature. He loves simple repeating board books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Art & Music:

With the Child-Sized Masterpieces he is doing great and simply loves matching them! They have become his treasures. We extended this into "music matching" where my daughter plays the opening bars of a song on the keyboard and he IDs it. He is good at this and loves it, and since he is deaf in one ear we are working on therapy goals of hearing discrimination too.

Math


We use Horizons Kindergarten Math as a spine for math; we happened to have it around the house from years and years ago (none of my other kids did Math in K so we hadn't used it). It is colorful and visual and Paddy (younger brother) likes it too. We supplement with hands-on activities and we move slowly since he is still learning one to one correspondence.


Reading:

He is actually a bit ahead of the game in 100 Easy Lessons and just starting to blend a bit. We also use Starfall a bit and I am experimenting with some Montessori activities. He really enjoyed the Red Letter Alphabet Book as well as the blue Number one so that is obviously a good approach for him.

Memorization and Recitation: Poems, Prayers, Songs

I work with him a LOT on memorization partly because it helps with hearing discrimination, partly because it lays down auditory patterns in his head which have been useful to him in the past in extending vocabulary and mean length of utterance, and partly because he absolutely loves to memorize. He is very retentive; has amazed us by being able to say the Rosary in Latin just because his oldest brother and I were working on learning to say it all last summer.

His sister works with him on memorizing songs and quotes from old movies, which is a game to both of them, and I work with him on prayers. We do this very informally. Most of this takes place in odd corners of the day -- I like the Montessori idea of flexibility within limits and he responds well to that. So I do have expectations but we work with what he's capable of that particular day. ... which varies. The main need for structure is MINE, so I can ensure his needs don't fall by the wayside when I get busy with the older ones. I usually don't really do Kindergarten, so I'm not used to it!

Executive Function

Just before Christmas I started to experiment with a weekly visual calendar for him and he responded great to that so now I am using a bedtime routine chart with him..... sort of like this(HT: Kim) I took photos of things like his toothbrush, his foot brace etc and laminated them and velcro-ed them to a poster board and that helps us both move through the evening events without forgetting anything. It helps ME, actually.

Other Areas:

Science is nature study, and health and hygiene, and very unstructured.
PE is physical therapy and fun things like sledding on the driveway, carrying firewood and pushing his Tonka truck around. He gets a few vaguely academic "homework" assignments from his occupational and speech therapists and sometimes I extend them a bit particularly if he seems to like them.

Life Skills

We have extended the food art mentioned in the last post, with great results. Aidan loves to help in the kitchen (supervised, of course). He watches us do chores and strives to imitate us.

Aidan rather LIKES structure and ritual and seeks it out. But our structure doesn't go further than he does -- in other words, he has responded badly when therapists in the past have used structure to try to take him further than he was developmentally ready to go. I don't know if that makes sense. The structure needs to be a support, not a sort of stretching rack, for him.

Plans for Aidan

The bottom line is that disabled children too are "born persons", and have the right to move at a pace of their own (excellent blog post at the Common Room, and here is the follow-up about Head Start -- the book she mentions, When Slow is Fast Enough, is definitely a keeper -- it reminded me a bit of John Holt's How Children Fail).

I wrote a bit about When Slow is Fast Enough on my other blog: here and here.

This post is the first in the series-- the next posts are:

• Plans for Aidan Year 0
• "Child-Garden" and Special Needs

Anyway, to start with the context for my plans for Aidan, I am putting down two former posts, one to the Catholic Charlotte Mason list from 3 years ago when Aidan was just getting healthy enough so I could actually think about education past basic survival and nurturing; and another I wrote more recently on the Real Learning message board (that will be in the next post). It is incidentally rather affirming to look at these old plans and see how much they did influence how we worked with Aidan and how much he has progressed. Though we never did get very elaborate with the arts&crafts -- we still seem to rely on therapist visits for most of that kind of thing!

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from 3 years ago:
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My 4yo Aidan is developmentally delayed and has sensory integration disorder after a liver transplant and stroke in infancy. The fact that he is also curious, responsive and full of joy and humor I credit mostly to his warrior spirit and to the grace of God.

At the same time, though, I think the fact that he has parents and siblings living a homeschooling life around him and with him, that there are books and pencils and papers everywhere, plus conversation and activity and lots of affection, has been a help.

Recently Aidan's vocabulary has blossomed tremendously. Ever since he was an infant we have sung to him, recited nursery rhymes to him, and showed him pictures in books. He loved all this, but was not able to give any verbal feedback. A year before last March, when he was just turning 3, he literally had 25 words, and that was counting both vocal AND signs -- I made a list. Now he is saying sentences as long as 4 or 5 words. This kind of progress, of course, I took for granted with my other children, but for him it has had such a liberating effect as he is able to express his feelings and opinions and make "jokes" -- even though in primitive toddler talk.

I was thinking about how CM can be worthwhile to special needs kids and came up with this list-- right now targeted towards preschoolers:

Nature/Outside time: vocabulary, sensory integration, gross and fine motor development, thinking skills such as observation and classification, physical health.

Literature: language rhythms, vocabulary, development of attention span and relationships, social comprehension.

Art/Handicrafts: fine motor, sensory integration, organization

Music -- rhythms, intellectual enhancement, relaxation of stress/anxiety

All of the above -- "connections" or relationships with the world and with other people

Habits eg order, attentiveness etc -- well, he does not pick up good behavior intuitively -- he needs to be taught specifically and reinforced often and often.

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A follow-up post also from 3 years ago
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Though children with disabilities probably do need more intervention than typically developing kids who just seem to learn by osmosis, they share the same need to be respected as small persons. Aidan has a stuffed Pikachu pillow. It came with him to the hospital -- he sleeps with it - he talks to it and it talks back -- you get the picture. My daughter mentioned today that she was bugged by one of Aidan's therapists making Pikachu part of one of Aidan's lessons -- "...making Pika talk like a Sesame Street character" in her words -- saying something about how well Pika knew his ABCs or something. It bugged me a little too -- and I realized it was because to Aidan, his toy is an imaginary friend and companion and protector -- not an object to be manipulated for the sake of a teaching moment. OK -- Pikachus are NOT very CM but this is just an illustration of something that sometimes bothers me -- and why I'm glad we homeschool!


I have for Aidan this year: Story Stretchers for Infants and Toddlers, the Gryphon "Comprehensive Toddler Curriculum" and a manual on Apraxia for preschoolers. I like the literature lists in the first two and some of the ideas for extensions will be useful. HOWEVER, I am going to resist the temptation to push the "curriculum" at the expense of the kid. Aidan is very inconsistent -- quick to learn when motivated, then distant and unfocused when something is going on to distract him. He does something like the poem counterpoint, and I'll think he's made a breakthrough, then he won't do an equivalent thing for weeks or months. I have to seize the good moments and build on them, and not be disappointed by the steps backwards. Easier said than done.

SO rather than have a lesson plan and a set structure, I have to have a short list of priorities in my head that I can build on in the course of the day during his regular activities. Right now my priorities are -- encouraging imitative speaking and turn-taking, developing the ability to speak longer strings of words, extending vocabulary and improving eating skills. Toilet-training and self-dressing are somewhat further down on the list.

So whether outside or inside, doing art projects or looking at books, I am trying to do things in two layers. One layer is the receptive comprehension ability. I try to build new language by elaborating on things he already knows. We do this by talking about pictures in books, or by making up story lines about things he is doing. If I "lose" him, I go back to what I know he
will respond to. This is a little like Greenspan's Floor Time concept, but not so forceful because Aidan is not autistic.

The other layer is the expressive communication. When I do or say something that he wants me to repeat -- like a new nursery rhyme -- I have him say or do something to elicit the repetition. The kids do this too, by habit. It's become second nature. Once he's repeated something many times in imitation of us, he finally incorporates it into his "spontaneous" repetoire.

CM recommends a broad exposure to different forms of knowledge or ideas -- and I find again and again that Aidan will seem to tune out something or even seem afraid of it, and then over time, if one is patient and careful, he will accept whatever it is and build a relationship with it. An example -- he had a Dorling Kindersley First Word book that he had looked at so much that he had worn it to pieces. I bought him a DK board book set in the same format with an Alphabet and Number book. At first he wouldn't even look at them or touch them. Over time, by leaving them around and occasionally picking one up and saying, Aidan, look at the grapes (or whatever) he got attached to them. This is how it works with almost everything.

Because of Aidan's "issues" he needs lots of repetition and reinforcement in order to really acquire a new idea or word. But it can't be just rote repetition, it has to be something that he accepts and enjoys, and it has to be introduced in different contexts. So I have to keep my agenda in the background, and be observant of him -- a sort of CM "masterly inactivity". Usually the best way to introduce something is to appeal to his imagination, his affectionate personality, or his sense of humor. And then....wait and give him time. If he isn't responding, I drop it and go to something else.

For Nature Study, what we do now is pretty informal. When he is feeling good and wants to walk, I let him explore and just talk about what he seems interested in. But when he prefers to stay in his stroller, I do bring him things and if possible relate it to something that he's seen in a
book -- OR often I do it the other way around and show him the book after he's seen whatever out of doors. One of his books had pictures of leaves, but he ignored them until I showed him leaves outside and he had a chance to handle them.

Eventually I'll become more structured about this -- collect rocks after showing him a book about rocks, that sort of thing. Let him bring his own collections home and store them to look at later. He is a little hesitant about handling natural things, probably because of the sensory integration issues. So I don't push things much right now.

About Arts and Crafts: I'm still getting arts and crafts off the ground for this school year -- I plan to have the siblings oversee a daily activity with him. We have a Headstart teacher come into the house weekly and she brings fun arts and crafts. He learned to use scissors (with help) last week. He also had a lot of fun with tempera paint. So I think mostly I will follow up on what she introduces. As time goes by I can tie his arts and crafts into what he is listening to in books. He is not really at that stage of development yet. He does like me to draw pictures for him, especially on his arms!! I draw happy faces or circles or whatever vocabulary I am emphasizing and hopefully, that teaches him a little about symbolic representation as well, especially since my drawings aren't very good!

How about "food art??" That is what we have been focusing on since Aidan came home from the hospital. He got extremely orally aversive while he was sick, to the point where he would gag if he saw anyone in the room eating. Today he helped me make coffee cake, pouring the liquids in and stirring. The other day he helped his brother make French toast. We occasionally make edible play dough -- basically cookie dough without the eggs -- for him to roll out and cut
with cookie cutters. All the kids like this.

He does a lot of water and sand play for sensory integration. I plan to adapt some of the Montessori activities for him this year A lot of pouring, arranging and sorting -- hopefully will help him slow down and do things more carefully -- he is sort of destructive right now, today he deliberately scattered cereal all over the floor not from malice but because he just couldn't resist.

Music:
I just sang the Muffin Man about 30 times for Aidan today : ) He laughed every time! I like the idea of music during therapy -- well, usually we do this too, but again it's me singing and I don't know if that counts as music. It sure works to help him through the more challenging stretches and bends though. I make up songs for him -- this is a family habit -- putting our own words to familiar tunes -- he really loves this and I think it helps him "pace" his own words. Up till recently he had a very difficult time saying more than 3 syllables at a time -- now his record is 12. Either singing or chanting gives him a rhythm to follow and helps him extend his length of utterance.

We have a keyboard, a guitar, and various kinds of whistles/recorders. We listen to a wide variety of music -- Corelli and Saint-Saens to Celtic and folk rock. Again, it's more CM "atmosphere" than a specific goal-oriented program.

Learning Goals: February is for Narration

I listed my learning goals for 2007 last December. January was devoted to notebooking. I think I did learn a lot about the purposes, principles and practicalities of notebooks. As for the kids: Clare has been keeping notebooks for many years, but I think she was born with the instinct and at most I provided supplies and example. Most recently she's made some scrapbooks that are much more beautiful than anything I've accomplished yet in the way of notebooking. Brendan keeps a spiral, like Liam and I do. It's basically a commonplace book -- theirs are generally for story ideas and drawings and that kind of thing. Their father keeps a similar notebook of his game design ideas. So basically, the older ones have all made notebooks work for them in their own way and maybe that isn't so bad. But for the younger ones, I'm going to revisit the notebooking topic when I get to century books and nature notebooks later in the year.

Now for this month -- February -- I'm going to focus on Narration.

Here are Karen's and Melissa's blogs on reluctant narrators.

Here is Tammy Glaser's page on Narration. I like her whole site: Reflections on CM's 20 Principles. Ambleside has a section on narration. Here is a Parents Review article, Notes on Narration. And here is an article on oral narration by one of my favorite bloggers Cindy at Dominion Family. Here is a blog Narration vs Questioning by Higher Up and Further In with some links to more Parents' Review articles. Narration by Karen Andreola. I guess that is enough for now!

The Trees -- Step by Step Planning Process

This part is about the nitty-gritty of weekly planning.

First of all, I should mention that we have a longstanding tradition about Mondays and Thursdays. They are Housecleaning Days. There are eight of us who live and work at home and we live in a dusty mountain region with a longhaired dog so we really need 2 cleanings a week plus maintenance.

On these days we have a lighter and more "mechanical" academic routine. We also save our screen time -- video games and videos -- for these two days. These things break up the rhythm of a day but we don't want to eliminate them from our lives (my husband is a computer game designer) so the best solution for us is to reserve Monday and Thursday afternoons for these things. This gives me a bit of extra time to plan while the boys are entranced with the game consoles.

I have been doing the bulk of my planning on Fridays and Mondays but after reading Dawn's Lesson Planning I think I will move the beginning to Thursdays. I do not know why I didn't think of it before but chronology is always a bit of a vexed question for me.

Anyway, this is what I do (in theory, that is -- in practice, it varies a bit from week to week):

• I look at my month-at-a-glance planner which has entries for appointments and other fixed-time events.
• With the information from the monthly planner, I fill out a week at a glance form and put it in a public place so everyone can see what's on the agenda for the next week (there are some forms here, but I use my own version with regular appointments like therapy and choir already shaded in)
• I print out and refer to my Motivated Mom checklist and consult my Declutter Calendar 2007.
• I look at the Liturgical Calendar, and also Saint of the Day (Magnificat) and Mass Readings if I have time.
  
• I look at the Year 5 Booklist, and the Year 8 Booklist, and the Ireland Booklist. If there are books I need to request from the library I request them (our local library is tiny so everything I want to get from the library has to be ordered a week or two ahead of the time I need them).
• I am just starting a habit of looking at Cay's Catholic Mosaic booklist to see which books to request from the library or dig out of my shelves. Right now I don't have a child quite at the developmental age to get the most out of Catholic Mosaic, but I'm trying to get familiar with the books and strew them for my older kids so I can use them when the younger two are at the right age.
  
• Then I organize one of my closets: the curriculum closet, the game closet, the arts and crafts closet. I keep some paper with me so I can list discoveries I make and keep them in mind for the future. Organizing things seems to help me think somehow.
  

Then I brainstorm. Recently I've been trying a sort of mindmapping and it seems to help me think. I list related resources, connections, ideas for introducing things, whatever comes to mind. Even if I don't get to do everything I have written down -- and generally, I don't -- it keeps me motivated and the plan works better than having no plan at all.

• The sequential subjects like Math and Latin are easy to plan. You just list what's next.
• Then I look at the Tanglewood Core Book pages to give myself a visual reference for all the subjects I want to cover; including Geography and Habits and memory work.
• I have just started getting a handle on Charlotte Mason's "broad and generous curriculum". My challenge is plugging all the ideas and options into a sequential day. I've found that if I take CHC's Lesson Planner 2-page spread (if you go here you can see samples and here under Weekly Lesson Plans there is a somewhat similar spread I have used in the past) and use it as a sort of chart for writing down the flow of the day for the two middle boys, it helps me visualize better what we will and won't be able to get to.

I like Dawn's file box method. I don't think I collect enough things ahead of time to need a file box, but visions of accordion folders were running through my head last night -- I have some around the house that I used to use for the older childrens' schoolwork.