6 year old daughter

Our daughter was in an expensive private school through 2nd grade. At age 8-1/2 she was still reading on a preschool level! (This was a regular private school, not an LD school.) We decided to homeschool for 3rd grade. We used the money we would have spent on tuition for those private therapies which we thought would do her the most good — vision therapy, PACE, and a Phono-Graphix intensive. At the end of 18 months, she was reading on a fluent 4th grade level, and we have never looked back. I am probably one of the most profligate spenders on the boards when it comes to homeschooling materials — because I always figure it’s cheap compared to what our private school tuition was!

Our dd thrives academically on one-on-one instruction. This last year, for 4th grade, she went to a small public charter school mornings and homeschooled with me afternoons. The school did “before” and “after” Iowa testing on the children, since this was its first year. My dd actually regressed slightly in those areas I left up to the school. In math, which we homeschooled, she made spectacular gains (we’re still catching up in math from the private school days).

Homeschooling and one-on-one definitely are far superior to classroom instruction for our daughter. However, homeschooling has its difficulties too. I am an older mother, dd is an only child, and our personalities are very different. Socialization when she homeschooled full-time meant tons of phone calls and a lot of driving on my part, in order to connect with other homeschooling children. There are very few children in our neighborhood to play with. The half-days at school worked out pretty well for us last year. Dd likes the sense of community, and she gets to interact on a daily basis with adults other than me, and a variety of children. If it ever stops working for us, we will go back to full-time homeschooling, but we are going to try half-and-half again for 5th grade.

Homeschooled children often have more opportunities for homeschooling, not less, especially if you live in a neighborhood with lots of children. The homeschooled child is free to play as soon as the other children get off the bus, and is also available for playdates during the day with other homeschoolers. There are also often local co-ops or homeschool groups that schedule regular activities. You can find these through one of your state’s homeschooling associations (always a good idea to join one or more of those).

In general, I find that my dd learns ***at least*** twice as much in half the time when working one-on-one with me, compared to classroom time. It varies, but a highly productive schedule for us involves about 1 to 1-1/2 hours a day 5 days a week on “seatwork” — academics. In addition, she has piano lessons once a week, a two-hour art class that she loves, and swimming lessons and swim club workouts at the Y — to cover physical education and the arts.

A good place to buy homeschooling materials discounted is http://www.rainbowresource.com. Their online store doesn’t include item descriptions, but email them for a copy of their thick printed catalog, which is a goldmine of information about the many homeschooling materials on the market. The homeschooling boards at http://www.vegsource.com are another excellent source of information about homeschooling curriculums and materials. One of the advantages of homeschooling is that if you buy some materials and they don’t work well for your child, you can sell them on the swap boards and try another approach.

Mary

Thanks for all the info!!
i am like you in that I have ordered all kinds of things off the web-
Handwriting without Tears, Reading Reflex, Touchmath, etc.
This stuff is cheap compared to the $6000 a year I was shelling out for
tuition. Unfortunately, my daughter learned very little in kindegarten
and I have worked like crazy all summer getting her caught up.
We are there in all areas but math, and that is because I have mainly
focused on reading.
She went through the Lindamood-Bell “Seeing Stars” program here
this summer, and went to OT. I worked with her at home doing
Reading Reflex, Handwriting w/o Tears, and Earobics on the computer.
She learned way more in 2 months with all of this than she did all year
at school.
I am thinking about Fast Forward or Pace next.
have you done these?
stephanie

We did both, but it’s a long story.

Basically, we stumbled onto PACE just as we were finishing up vision therapy. Dd has severe congenital astigmatism, which probably caused her severe developmental vision delays. Anyway, PACE did a great job of developing her visual processing skills once the VT had corrected her visual efficiency problems. PACE is where we saw dramatic gains in reading fluency. We saw gains in other areas as well. We liked PACE so well I went for the training, and we did a short refresher course at home last year.

Phono-Graphix pretty much took care of dd’s phonological processing delays (described by the SLP as “severely disordered” before we did PACE and the PG-intensive).

By the time we were ready for FastForWord (I got certified in that too — tutorial package only costs $100) I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to help dd. She had tested as having no auditory processing problems. However, dh did not want to leave any stone unturned, so we did it anyway. It was pretty much a waste of time for us (except useful education for me, and dd did seem to develop an even keener auditory sense — she tells me what all the popular song lyrics are saying because I can’t make them out at all). However, I have friends whose CAPD children benefited greatly from FFW, and it’s a very good program.

We were paying $7,000 a year for private school. That’s why I buy whatever I want for homeschooling! Some of the therapies have been expensive, but most of the homeschooling supplies have not. If I added up every single thing I have used for homeschooling and therapies, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t equal what we would have spent on the private school. And our expenses included things like travelling to Orlando as a family to do the PG-intensive!

Have you checked out NeuroNet? Looking at your daughter’s age and the CAPD, I think that would be the ideal therapy to do now. It’s very new and not widely available, but it can be done long distance (you bring the child to the clinic periodically for re-assessment and training in new exercises to do at home). Website is http://www.neuroacoustics.com. If you can’t do NeuroNet, I would definitely look closely at Balametrics (http://www.balametrics.com). NN actually incorporates Balametrics.

Typically, for a 6yo, you want to remediate all sensory level development deficits aggressively before moving on to the cognitive level of development (which is what PACE addresses). Sensory level therapies would include NeuroNet, OT, vision therapy, Interactive Metronome, sound therapies including FastForWord, and probably others I can’t think of offhand. If possible, it would be very good to get your daughter involved in gymnastics now — which does a lot for vestibular development, which is often delayed in CAPD kids.

FFW is probably done ideally at age 7 (when the auditory system of most children is pretty much completely developed). PACE is usually best put off until (1) all sensory level deficits, including sensory integration disorders, have been reduced as much as possible, and (2) the child is 8yo. It can be done younger than that, but the gains are probably not optimal for the effort involved. Cognitive skills build on the sensory/motor foundation, so you really want to have the sensory/motor level fully developed — which is the case by age 8 — and any sensory/motor deficits remediated as much as possible. This provides the broadest foundation for development of cognitive skills.

PACE is a really great program. You can go through an outside provider, but — assuming your child works fairly well with you — it can be advantageous to get the training yourself, because it adds a lot of flexibility to your scheduling.

Miquon is an excellent “discovery” math program to start with and it’s easy to do. Many homeschoolers combine it with Singapore Math, which is a very rigorous but almost self-teaching math program. We love Singapore! Website is http://www.singaporemath.com. I would recommend that you start Miquon now, and add Singapore or Math-U-See down the line. Rainbow Resource has the complete Miquon set (Lab Annotations book and 6 workbooks) for the best price. Also, you can go to http://www.groups.yahoo.com and join the “miquon-key” email list for information and support. The email list for Singapore is “SingaporeMath”, at the same website.

Mary

If the folks you mention it to look around some for their minds, they’ll find them… well, I would ask them what their concerns are if they have concerns about your specific situation, but probably it’s just such a strange concept (what? Not send your kid to school?) they have trouble grabbing hold of it.

Giving the kiddo a solid foundation is a huge favor she will thank you for.

I would use Math Facts the Fun Way. Website is http://www.citycreek.com

Mary