One month of homeschool

Our first month of homeschool is done. It feels like a grand accomplishment, but in reality it isn't all that. At first I was worried that it would be too difficult. Now I am worried it is too easy. Only time will tell.

So far our mornings have been filled with school work. We start with spelling, then Math, Reading and Science. Once a week we do History, Art, Grammar, Library and a field trip, one per day. We are busy from 8 am until 12. We listen to an audio book while we eat lunch, then they write in their journals. After that we are done for the day. Fridays are more relaxed than other days. We catch up on anything we may have missed, take tests and have our field trip. They take breaks as they need them, usually choosing to go outside and play for 15 min or so.

Erik is so relaxed and happy, I wish I would have done this years ago with him. He gets his work done quickly and without complaint. He does get overwhelmed with certain assignments, but if that happens I break it up into pieces for him, and he is fine. He loves our set schedule for each day and is good at keeping me on task. He will remind me "it's 10:00 mom you need to help me with math". He gets 100% in his spelling tests each week and last week he took a math test and got a perfect score on that as well. We have been working on reading fluently. I am getting the feeling he processes written words differently than I do. It seems like he processes the whole line of words at a time instead of reading each word individually. His comprehension is very good, but his oral reading sounds choppy. Sometimes it seems like he is giving a synopsis of the line instead of reading it back to you. I know that oral fluency is how they test reading ability at this level, so I feel like it is important he practice reading out loud fluently. We go sentence by sentence making sure to say each word, in the right order. It can be frustrating for both of us, but he is improving. The Singapore Math we are using is great. It is perfect for Erik. I love that we work on a concept until he has it 100% then we add to it a little. Riley's class is transitioning to Singapore math as well, so I am doubly glad We are using this method.

Tian loves homeschool, but I don't love it for him. He is a little more difficult to motivate, and struggles getting his work done some days. So far each week he has had one day where he just breaks down and refuses to do his work. It comes down to writing. He hates to do it and thinks I make him write too many things. It has been a while since I have had a first grader, so it is a possibility that I am pushing him too hard, but he is capable of doing the work, he just doesn't want to sometimes. He is reading and spelling quite well now and he really enjoys that he can sit down with an easy reader book on his own now. My biggest hang up with him is that he is lonely. He likes spending time with Erik each day, but I can tell that he misses being with other kids his age. there are no kids his age in our complex, so to get him playtime, I have to arrange play dates with kids in our ward. With 2 callings and home schooling each day I have not had much time to set those up, but I need to be better. If an opportunity comes up for him to attend the neighborhood school, I will put him back in. I hate the idea of putting him back in the "Everyday Math" program, but I am sure that like my other boys he will succeed in math despite a mediocre math program.

I miss my alone time. I am trying to arrange my life so that I can get up at 5 or 6am and have that time before the chaos of the day gets started, but I haven't made it yet. More than anything I just want to be able to go to the grocery store without kids and on a day when everyone else isn't there too. The 2 boys are a little unreliable alone together. Erik is not mature enough to keep himself and Tian out of trouble. Chris is here most of the day, but is sleeping so not much help. I am hoping as time goes on I will find ways to work around these small issues.

The Trouble With Bunnies

This week my life has been overwhelmed with bunnies. I have endured plagues of flies, frogs and mice in previous residences, so by comparison, bunnies seem unthreatening. It being spring and our local Thumper's being "twitterpated" we have steadily watched the rabbit population grow. The adults, (pictured here just outside my sliding glass door) are pretty cute. The fluffy babies with their big eyes and ridiculous ears are adorable.

Chewie has a two fold fascination with the rabbits. He both wants to study them and hunt them. As I said before it is spring and the rabbits are twitterpated. Chewie being the dispassionate scientist he is attentively watched and then retold his observations when a pair of rabbits completed their mating ritual right outside our door. Last week he checked a book out on cottontails, so he was able to not only give me the details on what he observed, but also the gestation period, the length of time the mother would be required to tend her little ones before they could get back to being "twitterpated" again. I have been a little nervous as to how to have "the talk" with him. I am unsure how much he will understand and be able to relate to. I see now that we just need to approach this from an anthropological standpoint, or maybe I will just get him a book.

When he is not studying the rabbits for the betterment of science, he is trying to catch one so we can eat it. They just finished a unit in their Colorado history class on mountain men. Chewie has decided this is the ideal way of life. One solitary man against the wilderness whose only goal is survival. To help him out on his lifelong goal to be a modern day Jeremiah Johnson he has decided he needs hunting skills. When I flat out denied him buying a gun, he started to get creative trying to catch them with his hands, a rope and even attempting to train our cat (who is terrified of the rabbits by the way) to attack and then bring the rabbit back to him. He sat out on our tiny patio with Chester (the cat) petting him and giving him a pep talk by saying "remember you are a predator, rabbits are your prey" Chester remains unconvinced.

Riley found an infant rabbit next to our car yesterday. It was about the size of a mouse, blind and mostly hairless. His tender heart could not stand to see it left out alone, and he wanted to adopt it. I convinced him to put it back near it's den, and that the mother would come back to take care of it. It continued to climb out of it's den all afternoon. He would go out every 10-15 min to check on it and had to put it back in. He cried and cried and begged me to let him bring it inside. Finally we googled it and I found an article that convinced him that the mother would return at sunset to feed and look after her babies. That wild rabbits do fine on their own and do not need human help ( there are only 5 billion of them in our complex alone). This morning he went out to check on it on his way to the bus stop. It was dead. It is at times like this that I wish there was an emergency happy pill for depression. I was able to get him mentally sound enough to get on the bus and head to school, and I hope there he will have enough things to occupy his brain so he doesn't obsess about it and get really depressed.

Mr T has been driving me up the wall this week. He is like a 2 yr old constantly getting into trouble. He is bored and needs something to do. I am beginning to suspect he is responsible for the bunnies in the garage. Friday I went to grab something out of the freezer in the garage, and found three baby bunnies hopping around in the garage. Cute fluffy hoppy bunnies the size of rats, not blind helpless ones. I wondered how they got in there, opened the garage a crack to let them out and went on my way. Well yesterday it happened again. Again I opened the garage to let them out, but this time I said "how do these bunnies keep getting into the garage!"

MrT came running downstairs and said "why do you keep letting them out!", but then he clammed up and wouldn't admit to putting them in there. It would not surprise me that while Chewie was slowly plotting to teach the cat to hunt for him, Mr T learned how to herd them into the garage for his own amusement.

A lady at the store asked me the other day what it was like to have 3 boys. I told her "never a dull moment"

Super Senses

April is Autism Awareness moth, and I didn't want this month to pass without sharing something about it. Living with an autistic child is difficult on a good day, but before during and after this out of state move, has been unbelievably hard, but we are making good progress, and Chewie seems to be settling in, so I hope that the worst is behind us.

I wanted to blog about the challenges of the Sensory Integration issues or more like disintegration of kids with autism, Chewie in particular. For those of you not familiar with this term, it has to do with the way some children process the information given to them by their senses. We have 7 senses. Touch, taste, see, hear, smell we are all familiar with but in addition to those 5 we also have our vestibular sense, and our proprioception. Our vestibular sense comes from our inner ear. it tells us if we are in motion or still, if we are right side up, sideways or upside down. It is the sense that makes us feel dizzy, or car sick, and it helps us keep our balance. The proprioception sense is the feedback we get from out joints and muscles. It is how we can tell we are holding up 3 fingers when our eyes are closed. From the day we were born we have used each of these senses to teach us how the world around us works. Sensory Integration disorder, or sometimes it's called Sensory Processing Disorder, is where the brain does not process the information the body is giving it correctly. This leads to all kinds of problems, from difficulty eating (foods are too stinky, or wrong texture) to anxiety in social settings, or crowded places ( too much noise or physical contact) even to hyperactivity (body requires extra movement (input) to determine where it is and what it is doing).

A person can either be hyper-sensitive to stimulus, meaning they get too much information from their senses, everything is too loud too bright etc, or hypo-sensitive meaning they don't get enough information, or it can be both. In Chewie's case he can be hyper-sensitive one minute and hypo sensitive the next, to the same stimulus. Sometimes he loves the piano in primary and wants to sit next to it, even reaching out to feel it vibrate, other times it is painfully loud, and he can't stand to be in the same room. As you can imagine this makes it difficult as a parent to predict how he will react to certain situations, to even know if it is going to be a problem or not. you have to be prepared for all outcomes all the time. Are the fireworks going to scare him, and he will need to cover his eyes with a blanket or are the going to excite him and is he going to run off in the dark. Is he going to have a good day at school, or is he going need to chew so much he will literally eat 5 pencils lead and all (this happened last week).

One thing we can predict is that he needs extra proprioceptive input all the time and he really enjoys extra vestibular input. This helps him stay calm and focused. He is always hypo-sensitive in this area, and if we don't provide him with extra input he seeks it himself. It is much better to have him vacuum a room(pushing and pulling a heavy object) or carry laundry up and down the stairs, than chew power cords (still haven't cured him of that completely) or running in circles around the couch. We have lots of little toys and gadgets to help him get his extra input. We have balls that have nubbs on them, he often rolls it under his feet or on his back. He has an electric tooth brush he can use on any part of his body, his favorite, sticking it up his nose. Digging and rolling a truck back and forth on the floor are also good, but difficult now we are in an apartment. I am working on making curtains for his bottom bunk, so it feels more enclosed, and he listens to white noise (rain or ocean waves) to help him relax and go to sleep.

At school this means he needs several breaks from the classroom in order to fulfill these sensory needs. He could swing, or roll on a fitness ball or do yoga (upside down poses are his favorite). Sometimes he spends his free reading time in a beanbag chair, or folding origami. All these things help him process what is going on around him more effectively, and function better.

The research shows that all kids learn more effectively when multiple senses are stimulated and that all kids benefit from extra sensory input, so I would encourage you to try a "Chewie" activity with your family. Let your kids play with your yoga ball, or better yet buy them their own. Let them write their spelling words with smelly markers, or on a plate in pudding. Play in the mud or make edible play dough. If it's active, smelly or messy you are on the right track!