Mom & Pop Home School

After the battle today has been, I’m about ready to institute this lady’s rules. Especially the one that says, “Life isn’t fair, and Mama don’t care.”

�http://www.katherinebell.com/HS%20House%20Rules.htm

Here is�something�I wish I had written. It so beautifully and powerfully�expresses some of the deepest feelings of my own heart. An excerpt:

�Raising children and mentoring the next generation is the most important thing we can do to change the world. It is the primary role of all women and all men, married or single. It is who we are. It is why we were born. We must train up the leaders of the future with confidence, power and grace. We must deliver. We must achieve results. We are the stateswomen of the 21st Century. If we fail, the world will fail. If we shrink, hesitate, or doubt, precious time will be lost. We are the leaders of today. Our choices and our actions are the most important choices and actions occurring in the world today.�

�http://www.tjed.org/articles/index.php?/archives/19-Steel-to-Gold-Feminism-vs-Stateswomanship.html

�

�

This seems fairly obvious to me, based on my own experiences and observations of people with whom I come into contact. But it’s nice to have research that backs it up.

http://www.childtrends.org/Files/Child_Trends_2002_04_17_FS_Marriage.pdf

YummyinmytummyDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-LISH! (And that’s all there is to say.)

For some reason asking my son to hand write anything is like asking him to swallow a hippopotamus. Whole. Raw, wriggling, and covered in tabasco sauce. Any time he has to write more than a one word response (and there had better not be too many of them on a page) he gives me a look that effectively combines utter disbelief, abject horror, and�stalwart rebellion with a rather venomous death threat. He then generally throws down his pencil, overturns the page or workbook, buries his face in his hands, and starts moaning, “Noooooooooo!” I suppose I should just be happy that he’s using facial expressions and other body language cues to demonstrate his emotional state. Pshaw!

Needless to say, we do a certain proportion of our work orally. But I am determined that the child WILL learn to construct sentences, paragraphs, and yes, entire compositions–ahem–eventually. To that end, I consulted several months ago with the autism specialist from the school district. She’s been most helpful over the past few years since Cricket was diagnosed. She’s a sympathetic soul I can turn to for advice, and she championed our cause at the IEP meeting where we announced that we were planning to home school. I was just sure she could tell me the magical theraputic process by which I could, eventually, coax actual writing out of my stubborn Aspie son. Instead, she patted me sympathetically on the shoulder, shook her head, and said, (more…)

Ok, not really. I’m very happy where I am. But I have been invited to participate in the Carnival of Homeschooling. What fun!�Check it out!

And if you need someone to explain to you (I did) what a blog carnival is, click this link.

I hate to break it to you, but there’s a very high chance that you do. Approximately 9625 out of every 10,000 people have NT, though the numbers have been shrinking in recent years. The excellent web site of the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (ISNT) is packed with excellent information about the disorder, including the official diagnostic criteria, and an online screening test you can take to see if you have NT.
Okay, I know I have a link to this website over there on the right, but I just have to highlight it with a feature spot because I love it so much.

For those who don’t know, “Neurotypical” means that you have a nervous system that functions “typically” (aka. normally), as compared with the portion of the population that falls somewhere along the autism spectrum.

The author of the site writes:

“This site is an expression of autistic outrage.About a year ago I learned I was on the autistic spectrum. Inspired by this discovery, I read everything I could get my hands on about the autistic spectrum. Much of it makes sense– for the first time in 41 years, I had a description, albiet an unexpected one, that fit me.

But a lot of what I’ve found out there, mostly written by “experts” and “professionals”, has been arrogant, insulting, and just plain wrong. My bête noire of the moment is finding my emotions described as “flat”. As someone with considerably greater expertise in my emotions than the “experts”, I can state unequivocally that my emotions are not “flat”. They are different, yes, but they are most certainly not “flat.”

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be fired up over being described as “lacking empathy”. Or I’ll be outraged at an exceptionally clueless “training” method being inflicted upon autistic kids. Or maybe it will be some new paper written by some “expert” from the perspective that neurotypical perception is correct, and my brain is a genetic mistake.

My brain is a jewel. I am in awe of the mind that I have. I and my experience of life is not inferior, and may be superior, to the NT experience of life.

Hence, this “Institute”. Persons on the autistic spectrum and NT supporters are invited to submit papers to the Institute, and to share your observations in “Current Research” (the guestbook).

-muskie”

So what is “normal” anyway, and who gets to decide? I know my son’s mind to be an amazing “jewel” too. Yes, it is different, but does that make it wrong, or just different? I believe with the last shred of my soul that my son is exactly the way God wanted him to be, and that God has a purpose for giving my son an experience of the world that is different in many ways from what most of us experience. It is a challenge, both for him and for those around him–but really, I think that’s the point. Challenges and differences are what make life so astoundingly beautiful and interesting.

We’ve only got a few days left in our 3rd quarter, and I only want a shortish break between the end of 4th grade and the beginning of 5th grade*, so I’m going to need to be ready to roll sometime in late May or early June. One thing I need to start ironing out, getting stuff for, and doing some serious planning on, is science. I’m having a hard time finding a curriculum I like, so we’re going the ‘do it yourself’ route. This is intimidating, but has lots of potential for fun, I think.

The plan, at this point, unless some fantastic prepackaged something comes to my attention in the fairly near future, is to pick a “spine”** to help us organize our studies, and then add in extra reading from the library, and use Science in a Nutshell packs for hands-on activities/experiments. I can continue using a lot of the materials I purchased this year for other subjects, so I can afford to put a fairly large portion of my budget into science this year. We are studying Life Science this school year, and I want to move on into Earth Science for fifth grade. (Then probably some introductory physics next year, followed by chemistry the year after. But I don’t have to worry about those yet. That’s just my general plan for science.) The problem is that I’m having a hard time deciding what to use for a spine. I’ll tell you some of the things I’m considering, and a little about what it is I’m trying to accomplish with this, and then I would so love to hear your ideas, suggestions, thoughts, other options you know about…you know, just whatever might help me think this thing through. Thanks!

Some possible candidates for spine books:

• The Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia: Sections on “Planet Earth”, “Space and Time”, and “Conservation and the Environment”
• The DK Science Encyclopedia: Sections on “Earth”, “Weather”, “Space”, and “Ecology” (Or there seems to be a new, updated version, or an Online Encyclopedia by the same publisher that seem intriguing, but I can’t “see inside” those, even to find out what’s on the table of contents so I can see if it covers the ground I want covered…sigh. Maybe the updated one has new Pluto information? It says it was published Nov. 2006…)
• How The Earth Works: The whole thing, in conjunction with How The Universe Works.

• [Edit: Another possibility might be Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of Planet Earth , alone or along with Usborne IL Book of Astronomy and Space. I think I might like these best so far….hmmm….]

One advantage to either of the two encyclopedias would be that I can continue to use it as a spine for physics and chemistry. So it would maybe have more long-term usefulness. Also, if I don’t have to buy a new book next year, I can spend more on hands-on lab materials. Science is really one of the highlights of our homeschool. We do it almost every day, and use it as a reward for slogging through math and language arts, which are frankly a little trying for both of us at times.
The advantages to the “How It Works” books are that there’s more information in the books, so there’d be less to track down as supplementary material at the library, and also that there are activities included in the text which could mean I’d need fewer Nutshell kits. (Although, don’t those look like fun? I have the “Microworlds” one to try out here in a few weeks when we finish our Life Science curriculum since we’re going to come up short on time. I’m itching to get at it.) This could turn into a disadvantage, though, if Cricket should happen to feel compelled to do every activity in the book. This is a possibility, as you never quite know what compulsive thing he might latch onto, but he does have other books with activities in them and is able to read past them just fine. So probably not a problem.

Some other options would be (more…)