How We Homeschool

Recently I received an email from a mom with a child who has the same diagnosis as Hannah - severe mixed expressive/receptive language disorder, asking about homeschool materials and what has worked for us. I know I have talked about bits and pieces about what we have done, but as I finished my email response to her, it dawned on me that it might be a helpful post here on my blog. So, here it is:

• I learned quickly that a packaged curriculum was not going to work with Hannah. The other thing I learned about packaged programs (especially in the early grades) is that there is just too much stuff for most kids - especially for kids with severe mixed e/r disorder. After throwing out all of my plans, I started thinking about how Hannah learns ... visual and hands-on (experiential) methods. I then did a lot of various searches on google using those key words (visual, etc) in relation to school materials. That brought me to two websites Eta Cuisinaire and Learning Resources. Initially I started with the Reading Rods Alphabet and phonemic awareness kit. While I knew that phonics was not for Hannah (Dr. C confirmed that for me), I felt that I might be able to ignore the phonics lessons and still help Hannah learn to read with this amazing visual/tactile learning tool. I was right, that first box of reading rods was the bridge from Hannah being a pre-reader to an excellent reader now.
• Kindergarten and 1st grade Math Rods (Learning Resources)
• Several more sets of reading rods, including rhyming words, word families, sentence building rods, prefixes, word endings. (I have ordered math and reading rods from both websites .... it's important to always check their clearance pages because I haven't paid retail for any of our sets. The sentence building rods I actually bought on ebay from a homeschool mom that had never even opened the sets! So, shop around).
• I Can Read books. This is a wonderful resource (especially for those of us not doing phonics). The Biscuit books (about a little dog) were the first books she picked up and read completely independently. I find great deals on these leveled readers at Barnes and Noble stores and on ebay. The books start at "Shared Reading" level and go through level 4 (chapter books). These are fairly comparable to grade levels. I have a friend with her PhD in Reading Education, and she told me with the shared reading level of books to point at the words as I read them to Hannah (visual association). She also told me that when Hannah started reading it was perfectly fine for her to point at each word as she read it and that as she improved in her reading she would stop doing it. She did point at each word as she read, and she did stop doing it all on her own.
• I put the physical word (using various types of labels depending on the surface) on almost everything in the house. She knew the names of things in the house - refrigerator, couch, door, window, etc etc - so giving her the visual word attached to those items was a fantastic boost in her reading ability.
• Workbooks. I realized early on that Hannah likes structure to our school work. While I was in Staples Office Supply one day, I noticed that they have a variety of workbooks for a wide range of grade levels (these are in the aisle with the crayons and things). What really caught my eye is that through the second grade, these books feature the character "Little Critter". We love the Little Critter books, so we tried one of the workbooks (pre-k reading at that point) .... what a great success! The lessons are fun, the work naturally builds on skills already learned and lots of opportunity for practice and review. What I really love is the work on comprehension .... these lessons have been vital in our work and in Hannah's progress. Here is a link to School Specialty Publishing Company (this link specifically takes you to the Pre-k Little Critter books, but you really should look around their site for amazing resources for every subject and grade level. This may very well be my favorite website of all for our ongoing homeschool resources .... we have workbooks for comprehension, grammar, making inferences, math, etc etc etc. Again, I get some fantastic buys in their sales!).

We had planned on homeschooling long before we knew of Hannah's language difficulties, so that didn't change our plans .... but it sure did make me toss out all my preconceptions and plans regarding what I thought homeschooling would be for us. I've had to adapt a lot, but it is so worth it!

OneMom

Time Flies

So much for my plan to post more often here at A Time to Talk!

First grade has been humming along quite nicely. We still have bumps in the road - all receptive language related - but overall, I am very pleased with Hannah's progress this school year. Her language has grown considerably, with the greatest increases in phonological areas and in comprehension.

Here are a few successes from this school year:

• Comprehension. Working diligently on reading comprehension has helped immeasurably in her oral comprehension as well. Her ability to think about what she just read or about what she just heard before responding has improved so much. One of her favorite things this year is to find "the directions", read them and then do what is asked for without guidance from me. This may not seem like a huge deal for some, but it is for us.
• Penmanship. First of all her letters and numbers for the most part are now all facing the appropriate directions. She has also improved greatly in keeping her letters more uniform in size and sitting on the line.
  
• Grammar. I was apprehensive about introducing grammar, when language in general is a challenge for Hannah. I started noticing though she seemed to have an excellent intuition for building grammatically correct sentences, so I introduced the concept of parts of speech. We started with nouns, and initially (for about a day), I thought we were going to be stuck on this concept. The next day, she was pointing out everything that falls into the noun category and then telling me if it was a person, place or a thing. The next day she was explaining plural nouns to me and what it means. So now we are doing grammar everyday, because she reminds me if I try to skip that subject!
  
• Geography of the United States. We just started this subject, and plan on continuing this one through the summer. We are going to spend a week on each state (in order of their joining the Union). Our base resource for each state is our 50-state quarter collection. We joined the subscription from the US Mint when they first started, and have two wonderful binders now full of the quarters, postage stamps and great information on each state. This is a fun and educational tool for us.
  

Obviously we still have areas of struggle (especially math), but all subjects are seeing positive growth (some more than others).

I need to do another post soon about more of our resources and processes that we have been using this year. It is likely that I have learned just as much this year as Hannah has! My learning of course is more about process and outcome, and I am feeling more confident as we wrap up this school year and prepare for second grade!

OneMom