Homeschooling with a Receptive Language Disorder

Sorry, regular readers.  This post is for the other moms out there googling educational info late at night.

William's speech has (yet again) really blossomed over the summer.  He's now making up his own sentences fairly often (maybe once every 1-3 days).  But when it comes to learning, we still need everything to be demonstrated.  We are at the beginning of the school year, but at this point we are having good success with:

-Sing, Spell, Read, and Write.  Actually, we don't really use the whole kit.  We are using the Grade 1A book for review of all the letter sounds and handwriting. At the same time, we are slowly working through the Kindergarten B book to learn how to blend sounds together.  I listened to the songs myself and then slowed them way down when I sing them with the kids.  I also changed some of the words in the short vowel song - egg to elephant, inchworm to igloo- to make it more clear and understandable to William.  William isn't into card games, so we haven't really used those.  And if we get to any of the readers before the end of the year, I'll be thrilled.

The best part about this program is the ferris wheel for the vowels.  We are going very slowly, taking weeks to do one lesson, but it is working.  For a kid with apraxia, saying all the short vowel sounds forward and back (a, e, i, o, u, u, o, i, e, a) is pretty impressive!

The handwriting in the first grade workbooks is a lot, but the style matches Handwriting Without Tears, and it provides the amount of practice that we really need.  We do it at the end of the day though, as it is laborious.  William really likes the cut and paste phonics that goes with it, so that helps offset the displeasure.

I'm going to supplement with the beginner BOB books for readers, and probably also Hooked on Phonics like we did last year.

-Essential Kindergarten B Singapore Math- A black and white but very clear basic math workbook.  I didn't get a teacher's manual, but use the suggestions at the bottom of the page as a starting point for lessons.  I like how it explains the concepts behind the math facts and how there's only a few problems on each page.

The book starts out with the concept of "one more," which William didn't seem to understand.  It seemed like the struggle was linguistic, not cognitive.  He couldn't seem to understand "more" to mean something different than "the stash in the cupboard."  (ie, I want more pretzels/cookies/cheerios.)  So we skipped that for now and are moving on to numbers 1-20 and place value.  As we do numbers, I've been trying to slowly and systematically introduce the idea of comparison that will hopefully lead us back to more and less.  We'll see.

I've been using joining blocks along with montessori small red and blue rods as our main manipulatives.  I have a set of cruisinaire rods, but I'm hesitant to use them as they introduce another level of memorization necessary to benefit from them (ie- The green stick is how many?  Is the pink stick ten??)  I also made a set of place value cards.

For Bible, we're going to study Exodus.  (Right now we're reviewing Genesis, and William's totally into Noah and his big boat.)

For life skills, we're working on dressing independently, making our bed, going to the bathroom and brushing our teeth independently, cleaning up after ourselves, and serving and clearing our food for breakfast and lunch.  As a mom, that's probably the most exciting subject for me! =)

For social studies, we are learning the Pledge of Allegiance, the rest of the words to America the Beautiful, our address and phone number, introducing maps, and (hopefully) doing a light overview of world cultures.

For science, my plan is to do topics related to our study of Exodus (rivers, crocodiles, fire, hail, etc).  We are also reviewing plants from last year.  Last week we did plant puzzles, picked the first green peppers from our pepper plant!, and started a potato root-growing experiment.  State standards suggest we talk about living/nonliving matter and natural/manmade matter.  Not sure how to do that yet.

For health we're going to do the food pyramid.  Did anyone know the food pyramid has changed again??  When I learned it, there were three levels with grains on the bottome, then fruits and veggies, the meat and dairy, and sweets at the tip top.  But now it has stripes going up.  Does anyone know anything about that?   Anyway, I hope to use painter's tape and tape a pyramid on the wall with the different sections (once I get them figured out), and let the kids tape play food in the right places.  We'll see.  We could really use lessons on healthy eating around here, so if anyone has any good kid-friendly ideas on this topic, feel free to share!

With all that regular education, it's hard to remember sometimes that the main thing we need to focus on is language.  But half of our IEP is language goals, so that helps.  My hope is to increase vocabulary through making posters, building shadow boxes and other models, watching movies, singing songs, and playing games.  The harder language goals are the interactive ones (conversation skills, etc).  I'm still praying over how to really teach and practice those and not just react when it goes poorly.  Of course, it will help when classes get underway this week.