With Thanksgiving

I've been emailing with someone who makes me realize just how much God has blessed us. While days with my boys may be difficult, He has tenderly sustained us with benefits unknown in many places.

I am incredibly grateful for my church, Bethel Presbyterian and the teaching, fellowship, and encouragement it has consistently provided. I've written previously about how the women helped us get Samuel accustomed to sitting through the worship services.

While Samuel clearly has many challenges, he also is rich with capabilities and has been spared many of the effects of autism. He drives me crazy some days, but generally greets the world with friendly optimism.

We are within easy driving distance of some of the finest medical institutions. While we have no specific cure for autism, Samuel has been able to receive excellent occupational and speech therapy. He has also recently been extensively evaluated, which I'll discuss in another post.

Slip Sliding Away

Have Samuel go down a fast waterslide? Climb rigging? Try to step across slippery logs? A few years ago, these acts would have been unimaginable.

Samuel completed occupational therapy since we last appeared regularly online. When he started OT, he had many problems including core and upper body weaknesses and difficulty with large and small movements. Because he could not stabilize himself easily, Samuel was very cautious about lifting his feet off the ground to swing, fall, leap and so forth. Over the course of his therapy, Samuel completed strengthening and balancing exercises, and Miss Nicole had Samuel falling sideways or backward into big puffy pads. He toppled over from the ground and progressed to plunging several feet through the air.

I don't think we realized how far he had progressed until we went to a water park just after Labor Day weekend. He went down every slide and took on challenges from body surfing to wave pools. He loved every minute of it! What a joy to see Samuel go!

Where is Samuel Now?

I'll try to bring our situation up to date. Samuel is using third grade material this year, but home schooling is proving to be as much of an adventure as it ever has been. When I started this blog, I had no idea how our lives would work trying to home school a spectrum kid. He remains a challenge behaviorally, but has proven over and over again to be very bright and (when he wants to be) a willing learner.  So how are we meeting his particular needs? I'll start with handwriting.

His handwriting remains a challenge, but he has recently been correcting himself to use a correct grip on his pencil and I'm confident now that he has the needed fine motor control. We are using Handwriting Without Tears, and that curriculum views the switch to cursive as a good time to "catch up." This came as a nice surprise as we had ordered this year's materials with some trepidation. (Cursive? The kid can barely print!) But he's always been able to read cursive and was trying to develop a script on his own.

HWT uses only 4 types of connections between cursive letters and he has already learned several. He's also quickly grasped the idea of keeping his pencil down on the paper continually.  I hope this will be a big year to catch up with his handwriting. In the meanwhile, I'm playing "scribe" to him in some subjects. Why bother, given the plethora of computers? I've seen just enough about handwriting creating additional pathways to the brain to convince me that it is a necessary and useful part of education.

Changes Coming to Teaching a Spectrum Kid

I have decided to resume this blog with regularity. So many options are now available, and I am hoping to make changes that will make information more accessible. So, this post is a "heads up" that this blog may change radically in appearance, but will maintain the same purpose: to provide help and encouragement to others who may be home schooling a special needs child by providing a glimpse into my family's school adventures.

He's Write!

Samuel never fails to surprise me. He can make up stories with abandon! Our speech activity today gave three words around which Samuel was to make up a story. So he might be given: frog, girl, house to launch an idea. We've made various attempts at games like "I spy," and he wouldn't get it at all, and thinking about an object and talking about it just seemed foreign. He's only recently started playing make-up games that require imagination. Now I find the seeds of a writer! Once again, I'm discovering that you cannot underestimate a spectrum kid!

Of Math and Spills

Hmmm, I showed the boys cups, pints, quart, and gallon measurements this morning. I think it would be smart to wait until this afternoon for them to do their own pouring and measurements out on the back deck! The ubiquitous soda bottle should make the metric measurements easy to show them when it's time.

He'd be where?

This last year has shown me that homeschooling was absolutely the right choice for Samuel. While we continue a good relationship with local educators (Samuel receives speech therapy from them) we've resisted their claim that he needs to be better integrated with his peers by attending public schools.

I have come to understand two things. First, the school's goal would not be for Samuel to integrate into differing roles in society. Instead its goal would be for him to be able to do well in a homogeneous group of 20-30 kids -- a setting unlike what we find in the rest of life. Secondly, because of the slow pace of his potty training, he'd likely be in a "self-contained" classroom. In other words, he would have spent most of his day with other children who have difficulties with language and social skills. What a detriment that would have been, and the administrators advising me to do this never said a word about this setting!

The value of what I've been able to teach him during our days together will be a subject for another day ...