Most of my best (most successful) resolutions are laterals…. that is, they appear sideways or in reverse rather than in a forward direction. I suddenly decide to just start doing X, or find I have already been doing Y and then it’s easy to continue. When I plan to accomplish Z, I had better write [...]
For the past month or so Paddy has been telling me to trace the words with my finger as I read aloud to him. It’s funny because I clearly remember John Holt writing that he once thought to be helpful and educational by doing this while reading to a 3 year old girl, and the [...]
Today was Aidan’s last speech session. Kevin drove us down to the school because he was getting worried about how worn down the brakes are — bless him : ). Aidan played a 4-step Sequencing game. It was the SLP’s last day at the school and she was a bit off her focus. We both [...]
This is what Aidan and I were working on this morning – (Disclaimer: I don’t have any formal Montessori experience — I can’t even get the hang of reading the books about Montessori at home — so this is just how I am using the materials to suit my special needs learner. Concrete and visual [...]
I uploaded these checklists to help get us through the next few weeks before we phase into summer. Weekly chart for Kieron (year 5) Weekly chart for Sean (year 8 ) Aidan’s Therapy Sheet Paddy seems to be catching the literacy motivation bug. Yesterday evening he spent a lot of time scribbling on old post-it [...]
Since this has been an unschooly week I’ll just summarize the eclectic odds and ends we have been working on. Art Kieron is doing gif animations now. He downloaded a program to try and add music and sound effect midis to the “movie”. So now he is working on that with a little help from [...]
Aidan seems to be in a pattern of doing his literacy-activities in the evening. This is from an old activity book that he happened to come across (I picked up a folder and accidentally scattered the pieces, and he grabbed them) Matching up the picture, you discover a word. He loved just the matching part [...]
This is actually about Wednesday, which is confusing. The little ones went on a literacy spree yesterday. We got the Handwriting without Tears catalog in the mail a couple of days ago and both Aidan and Paddy have been taking turns marking it up, tracing the sample pictures and having a lot of fun. It [...]
I always feel like Ma Ingalls when I write something like “today we went to town” like it was a real occasion. For us, it is, since it involves a 60 hour one way trip to get there and then, since “town” is one of those horizontal valley cities, it takes a lot of [...]
I wrote several posts with notes on Mel Levine’s Myth of Laziness on my other blog. I’m going to list them here because I thought it might be of interest to some of the homeschooljournal community too. The Myth of Laziness Writing difficulties Project Checklists When I wrote about Laziness once before on here, I [...]
