Re: What to Teach

Hello! Good for you that you are going to hs your son. I pulled my son, also in 1st grade, out of school in January and we are all the better for it, my son especially. My son has various special needs, including dysgraphia and pretty severe attentional problems. I would also be interested to hear what others have to say about a curriculum for children with LD who are homeschooled.

So far our method and philosophy has been to focus on areas of interests and strengths. My son has such compromised attention that we have found that finding areas which engage him and he feels some interest in has helped a lot. We are not using a formal curriculum but do have some structure to our day. We often plan out what we will do in the morning. A typical day might be to do some reading/science/math/writing activities. We also do art and lots of pretend play. Science - usually hands-on things we find in kids science books: Reading - we do have some reading recovery type books, early readers, lots of story books, books on tape, computer reading programs, alphabet bingo, phonics type activities, rhyming games, phonemic awareness activities, storywriting/storytelling, etc.: Writing - writing in sand/salt, practicing on the computer keyboard, writing stories (he dictates and I type), we also just started the Handwriting Without Tears program which is going well so far: art/computer/math (we often do math by cooking, science, math games, board games, but it sounds like you found a good math program - I am interested in hearing about Math-You-See). I don’t know what others would say but what we have found is that it seems less important (at this age, anyway) to focus on what others think he should be learning (except for reading and math) and to find areas of interests and then find ways to teach that in a way that engages him and helps him to feel successful and that he is learning. My son will give me ideas about what he’d like to learn about - knights, castles, weather, mummies, frogs - and I can usually find lots of good books at the library and books on tape and educational videos and sometimes tie in art activities and science. What does your son like to do? What are his interests? If he likes dinosaurs can he dictate stories to you about dinosaurs or listen to stories on tapes about dinosaurs or make dinosaurs out of clay or do math activities using dinosaur figures. Maybe others with more experience will have different ideas and more wisdom. But so far we are seeing that by taking our son’s natural curiosity and desire that it has been easier than we thought to think of ways to make it accessible for him. That isn’t to say it is perfect - it isn’t. But it was a great decision and our family life is much, much better. Good luck! If you’d like to email me directly I’d love to chat as we are starting out with kids the same age with the homeschooling adventure. I will also be interested to hear what others have found useful in terms of curriculum for children with LD. I am open to new ideas!

Kim
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I think Kim’s right on the money. Sounds like you’re going to target those skills hard — so the kid will be doing some pretty impressive brainwork. Play to his strengths outside of that and develop his curiosity and love for learning.

You may, however, need to structure things a bit more than other kids might need. THis can be external organizing — having a plan so that it’s not two days looking at bugs and then a day with dinosaurs — and also help with showing how thoughts and ideas are organized too. Some kids would do just fine withtotally kid-driven learning. THey’d make the connections between what they did one day and what they did the next day. Some kids simply don’t make those connections intuitively, so it would be a disservice to them to make them guide their studies. IT can really help to have one or two areas that become that kid’s real area of expertise where he can keep developing skills and knowledge that will serve him well for years to come. (And if the parent also tends to be disorganized it’s even more important to figure out a plan — on the other hand, if the parent is a totally organized type, it’s important *not* to try to make the kid something he isn’t!)

I think what I am most concerned about is how and where to teach certain things. For example, his class is now learning about using -ed and -ing ending on words and using contractions. I don’t think I ever would have thought of those things to teach him. He seems to do better with some kind of structure and seems to enjoy working with worksheets. I know that there’s a lot of packaged curriculums out there but I didn’t know of any for an LD child or if we would even need something like that.

As for letting him lead in learning, we can try that as a supplement. Oddly enough, he really doesn’t have a lot of interests. I guess I will have to expose him to more things and see if that perks his interests.

Andrea

There’s a website called The Mental Edge, http://www.learningshortcuts.com that does a good job of identifying skills taught at each grade level (in all subjects). The “reviews” — online multiple choice tests — give you quite a detailed idea of what a usual grade level curriculum covers.

Keep in mind that topics covered in school are often mastered much later. For example, dd will get lots of work on endings and contractions next year in 5th grade. She was not ready for them in 1st grade. Most 1st graders are not capable of mastering endings and contractions; basically, they just get some exposure to them.

For grammar, I can recommend Easy Grammar (http://www.easygrammar.com). We got the workbook for Grades 3/4 (one workbook covers two grades) and it does a really good job of covering the basics without the fluff that confuses/frustrates LD kids. You could do just one page a day. I personally don’t care for their Daily Grams (if you get it, get it for prior years, otherwise you will be “reviewing” material that you haven’t even covered yet). Easy Grammar gets good comments from homeschoolers, whether the kids are LD or not.

Since your son likes workbooks, you may want to try supplementing MUS with Singapore Math workbooks. They are really good, appealing to children, largely self-explanatory, and they provide valuable computation practice that is somewhat lacking in MUS. They’re inexpensive, too — about $7 each (4 workbooks per grade level). Website is http://www.singaporemath.com, although you can buy the materials much cheaper from overseas companies if you’re willing to wait for shipping by sea.

A really nice curriculum set I am looking at getting for this summer is the geography/science study through literature put out by Beautiful Feet. It has gotten really good comments from parents, who say the literature is excellent. This is a way of combining reading/reading-out-loud with exploration of science and geography, and spreading it out over a period of 2 years or so. Website is http://www.bfbooks.com/index.asp (Their history sets get criticized for slant, although the literature selections for history are universally praised.)

The Calvert book, “A Child’s History of the World”, is also excellent for an 8yo. You can buy freezer paper and tape it to a long wall, and together create a timeline of world history.

Homeschoolers generally cover topics in a different order than schools. I was concerned with detail when I started homeschooling, but have come to realize that it isn’t so important *when* contractions are studied as it is that they get studied when the child is ready to learn them. Teaching them when the child isn’t ready is an exercise in head-bashing for both parent and child. We just did some “work” on contractions for the first time this year (dd is almost 11), but I’m not sure yet if she’s actually mastered them yet.

Mary

It can be tough to find materials for things like spelling and grammar that work for LD kids. I was frustrated for years with that — there didn’t seem to be anything out there that broke things down enough, structured it enough, *and* gave enough practice so the kids actually learned it and could use it. WHen I worked at a private school for LD kids, they had their own that one if the English teachers had put togehter, so I know I wasn’t alone in my frustration (and I’d recommend it — it’s called _When They Can’t WRite_ and you can get it through the school).

ENglish was separate from what I did with the kids, which was reading and spelling skills; we used *lots* of materials from Educators PUblishing Service. Rudginski and Haskell’s _How to Teach SPelling_ does a great job of going step-by-step through all those little detailed patterns, though we’d always take about three or four times as long as the book seemed to suggest, and do a *lot* more practice and review. Bottom line is you can’t teach a skill for two weeks and then move on and assume it stuck. You have to include practice and review and more review and more practice for months. (Okay, you don’t have to — most people don’t :) But if you *do* the kid *will* actually learn it, instead of having just “Done” a bunch of work and sort of getting it and occasionally applying it. I would never have believed it — I thought it was unnecessary drudgery but I went along with it just to see if people with more experience were right. THey were.)

JOanne Carlisle has some excellent reading skills books called “Reasoning and REading” that deal with a lot of comprehension issues and give a lot of excellent practice with working with words. My favorite for writing is Diana Hanbury King’s _Writing Skills for the Adolescent_ though.

The best part of having lots of practice and review in what you do is the sense of mastery that the kid gets — though it can be tough to get ‘em to do the practice at first, because often they’ve never actually mastered a skill, just grabbed it long enough to survive the week’s lessons in it. Once they realize they cn actually *own* the kn owledge, it’s a wonderful thing to watch ‘em take over their own learning. And the other good thing is it does mean less figuring out *new* stuff :)

BUT — don’t feel like the kiddo has to spend 8 hours a day school, school, school :)

Sue,
Can you tell me where I can get these materials from?

Andrea

Educators PUblishing Service is at http://www.epsbooks.com — that’s where the Carlisle and King and lots of other good materials are. (And by the way Joanne Carlisle did an article in the International Dyslexa ASsoc’s newsletter, _Perspectives_, which this time out is focusing on reading comprehension).

_When They Can’t WRite_ is from New Community School — 804-266-2494 is the phone number there and the school secretary can send you the information (do her a favor & don’t call at 3:20 when school’s getting out ;)). THeirwebsite is at
http://freenet.vcu.edu/education/newcomm/ . The book is worth the money — it really lays everything out for you (and could probably be resold when you were done).

Thanks everybody!

Andrea