Update week of 12/9/2013

Once again it has been a few weeks since I posted.  This year has flown by as we just completed week 16 of MTMM.  I also can tell it is close to Christmas because we have hit a few bumps in the road which seems to always happen around this time of year.

I will start with the smooth sailing parts first.  N. just completed The Elements book in science and felt like he learned quite a bit and really enjoyed it.  Here he is building chemical bonds with marshmallows.

For his history project this week he made Tollhouse cookies.  He wanted to make them without any help from me.  Usually I help to just steady measuring spoons etc, but he was determined to do this on his own.  He did a great job, and really didn't spill too much flour on the counter.

One of his Draw and Write projects this week was the Golden Gate bridge.  He also did Mount Rushmore but he didn't want me taking a picture of that.  It was a tough one to draw.

Nature journaling continues to be an activity he enjoys.  For a kid that has some much trouble with handwriting his drawing has really come along.

Now for a few of the bumps in the road.  The oral narration where I type it continues to be a very stressful thing for him.  He  just freezes up.  He was to narrate on the stock market crash and the Great Depression.  It should have been pretty easy, but he really struggled.  He said he didn't understand the stock market enough to really understand what was going on.  We talked a bit about that and that helped, but it is almost like he has test anxiety with this activity.  I am not sure how to make it better for him.  So we just keep pressing on and I tell him there is no right or wrong answers.  I think the fact that he has words he has to include makes it seem like there are right and wrong answers though.  They are really there to help him, but he gets stressed about including them.

He also struggled with an activity to list signs of prosperity.  He really has never seen true poverty other than on tv so I decided to pull in the help of my Dad.  My dad was born in 1927 so I had N. call him and ask him to describe his world during the Great Depression.  That worked wonders.  The depression came to life for N. and it was a great bonding time for grandpa and grandson.

Math has been our final bump.  He is doing Teaching Textbooks Algebra and I do believe it is a good fit for him.  He says he understands the teaching, but he doesn't like how long it takes him to do a lesson.  He averages an hour to an hour and 15 minutes.  He had a major meltdown this week over it and so we are continuing to talk about attitude and how this is just how the upper maths will be. 

We have one more week of school before we will take a 2 week break.

Update week of 11/18/2013

Another 2 weeks have come and gone and so I thought I would update what we have been up to before he start a week off for Thanksgiving.

In history N. has been learning about the Roaring 20's, Amelia Earhart,Louis Armstrong and the rise of Stalin among other things.  Two weeks ago he was finishing up learning about WWI and for Draw and Write Through History he drew the Red Baron's plane.  He worked so hard at drawing this and I was so impressed with his drawing.  He did use a ruler since drawing straight lines with a hand tremor is pretty difficult.  Even holding a ruler while trying to draw can be a challenge.

In story time we finished the book "War Horse" which is a fantastic book and started "Gladys Alyward". N. enjoys books about missionaries so he is looking forward to this one.

In Science he continues with the Elements.  He did an experiment with red food coloring and bleach and he made element baseball cards.

The variety of hands on activities has really helped him to become familiar with some of the more common elements and what they are used for.

In literature he finished Dust of the Earth.  We are not doing DITHOR this year since he had finished the student workbook last year, but he is reading some of the books and we discuss them and talk about some of the literary elements like conflict and foreshadowing. 

He continues to push himself to write longer and longer written narrations, which is good since that is required next year.  He still has some difficulty catching his errors when he proof reads it so we are still working on that.

This week when he had to pick his quote from Worthy Words to copy I took Julie's advice and told him to concentrate on picking the best quote that he felt covered a main idea and then if it was long he could type it.  He did a good job picking the quote and it was long so he typed it.

The only bump in the road has been Algebra.  I still think Teaching Textbooks is a good fit for him, but he has just reached the point in Algebra where the problems are hard and require him to write out so many steps to solve.  He writes all the steps, but it does wear him out and math takes at least an hour for him to do.  He had a little trouble understanding mixture problems this week so when we restart we may "sit" there a while and I will use problems from other books I have on hand to give him extra practice.

Update for the week of November 4, 2013

N. had another good week.  As depressing as I think modern times can be to study, he seems to like it.  It is the type of kid that does much better learning something if he has heard of it before so since he has heard of many of these wars and these rulers that could be why he likes it.

In history he learned about WWI and this is the first war that he ever found interesting.  We started reading War Horse for our story time and he can't wait to see what happens the next day.  Of course he also likes the fact that I keep ending up choked up by the time we finish our reading for the day. 

One of his biggest challenges this year has been doing the oral narration when I am supposed to type it.  I first tried letting him record it into his ipod and that was a disaster.  It was as if he had test anxiety.  He stuttered and stammered and got frustrated and went back to his habit of not giving many details.  So now I am typing while he narrates.  His narrations are much slower and methodical and lack much personality, but they are improved from the way we were doing them.  Right now he is looking back at the reading more than he should so I am encouraging him to look for names etc and then to look up and try and narrate.  It is funny because when he orally narrates the other weeks where I am not typing it he doesn't look at the book near as much and his narrations are better.

His history project this week was a salt painting.  Not sure it worked out exactly like it was supposed to, but he did get the paint to follow the salt line.

His nature journal assignment was to draw fall leaves of which we have plenty right now.  You might wonder about the blue leaf.  We do have a pear tree where the leaves are almost a red-purple in color right now.  I think that is what he was trying to capture.  He added more typing after I took this picture and I think he is finding he actually enjoys journaling, as long as he can type it.

For Science he had the option of making a periodic table pillowcase from fabric paint or playing the periodic table game we had learned last week.  There is no way either one of us would tackle that pillowcase so he played the game with his dad.

He is doing Teaching Textbooks Algebra and that is going well.  I know some people think it is light, but we are using the 2.0 version which is more challenging and I find it is going at just the right pace for him.  I do add in some additional story problems sometimes.

Update 10/28/2013

N. continues to just sail right along in MTMM.  He seems to find this period of history more interesting than some he has studied.  He usually dislikes studying wars, but for some reason WWI caught his interest.  I think it is because we have both really enjoyed reading "Angel in the Square" for story time.  He understands more of what all was going on politically during this time period thanks to that book.

He drew a U-boat for Draw and Write Through History. He loves doing those.  You can also see that his narrations are getting quite lengthy.  He continues to do his own timeline labeling.  His copywork got off to a rough start as he forgot to do cursive for the first few words.  Sometimes those glitches in his processing just sneak in there.  He obviously became aware and fixed it so it doesn't serve any purpose to make him redo it.  He is pretty good at coming up with bulleted points about a person or topic thanks to his training in previous guides.

In Science he is working through The Elements and he is learning so much.  My dh is an engineer and loved science, but hated Chemistry.  N. shows him each night what he learned and my dh says he might have liked chemistry if someone had ever taken the time to explain things the way The Elements does.  I can see how it is laying a strong foundation for Physical Science next year and then Chemistry.  Here he is figuring out how many protons and neutrons certain atoms have.

One of his history projects 2 weeks ago was to make Sopapillas.  His dad made them with him at night.  I am finding that there is great benefit in having dh do even 1 thing a week with him.  It doesn't always work out that way, but if it does they both seem to enjoy it and learn more about each other from doing it. 

Now for a few pictures that aren't HOD related, but they were a big part of his week.  N. is very into the sport of parkour so his jack-o-lantern had to be parkour related.  He carved this all by himself after I cut the pattern out on my Silhouette die-cutting machine.

I know celebrating Halloween is controversial among Christians, but we do carve pumpkins and when he was younger he wore costumes that were not scary and went trick or treating.  This year he wanted to dress up as Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty (his favorite show) and hand out candy to the little kids.  He was so funny and he looked just like Uncle Si sitting on the porch with his tea glass.

Update week of 10/14/2013

Ok so I am not very good at updates this year.  I think part of it is that as N. has gotten older their just isn't quite as much to take pictures of and I like to have pictures in my posts.

N. just finished week 9  in MTMM.  I sound like a broken record, but things are still going along smoothly.  He enjoys everything in the guide for the most part.  He isn't real thrilled with the Presidents DVD, but I am not sure why. He says he just doesn't like documentaries, which is true.   I find it very interesting.  I do watch it with him even though it is an Independent box. He is still getting the hang of picking out the vital information from a video so I just sit and watch it and wait to see what he is going to jot down in his notes.  Sometimes he will watch almost the entire thing without writing anything down so then I have to pause it and ask him if he thinks anything they have said is worthy of notes.  I figure this is just all part of training him.  He is requiring less intervention from me each week. 

In Science he is now doing the book The Elements and is really liking this.  He seems to retain information from this book well also.  Most likely it is all the activities he does as a follow up to the reading.  We played a Make 5 game this week so he could learn about how elements combined to make different minerals.

In story time we finished reading Mama's Bank Account, which had to be one of our favorite books that we have done together.  Now we are reading Angel on the Square that takes place in Russia during the last years of the Romanov's.

One day he was supposed to go outside for his Nature Journaling.  I offered to just let him look out a window since it was cold, but he went wanted to do what the book said and go outside.

One thing he has started doing which seems like a small thing, but to me is huge, is labeling his timeline.  He has always dictated this to me since he has to write so small and neat to fit it in the box and this was nearly impossible for him.  This is just an example of some maturity I see him in and willingness to push himself a little more.

Update week of 9/23/2013

     I didn't manage to update the blog the last few weeks so this post will contain pictures from those weeks.  We just finished week 6 of MTMM and I am very impressed with how Noah is taking charge of his school day.  He starts at 7:30 and takes about a 45 minute lunch break and then is done no later than 1:30.  He has decided he likes to get the right side of the plans done first and that leaves what he considers the fun stuff for the second half of the day. 

     In history he has read about the Gilded age, the annexation of Hawaii, factories, unions, etc.  He seems to find it pretty interesting.  We read the book Factory Girl for our story time and it was a tough book to read.  It really made him realize how fortunate he is.  The follow up activities for the story time have him reflect on different things that use a deeper level of thinking and I really like that.  I have been very impressed with his written narrations.  He is writing lengthy, multi-paragraph narrations.   I pulled out his CTC notebook to show a friend that is considering homeschooling and using CTC and I was amazed by how much progress N. has made in the area of written narrations. 

   One of his history projects was making a Hawaiian Lei.  Cutting and rolling paper is a little tough for N., so instead of getting frustrated he just ends up laughing when he can't quite manipulate things.  I do help him with cutting as needed because otherwise his hands get too tired for other subjects.

Nature Journaling is a subject that also can be kind of tough for him.  He always does the drawing and then I let him type any journaling, but often he doesn't write too much.  I am ok with that.  He isn't a guy that likes to express lots of his thoughts on paper.  As long as he writes something. 

 He likes the variety of the history spines this year.  Here is a pic of him with his reading companion.

He did a drawing of the Titanic from Draw and Write Through History.  It isn't his best drawing ever, but I noticed last year it takes a few drawings for him to get back in the swing of things with these.  I was pleased with his cursive paragraph that he wrote to go with the drawing.  His letter formation is still not perfect, but considering the occupational therapist in ps said the most we could ever hope he would do was to sign his name, I consider this paragraph a success.

I am also pleased with his Presidents notebook entries.  He is learning to take notes from a video, which is an important skill that I see him figuring out slowly but surely.

So far this year has been a smooth one.  I attribute that to all the skill building that is incorporated in the previous HOD guides. 

Weekly update for 9/2/2013

We finished our third week of MTMM.  Unfortunately I didn't do a good job of taking pictures this week.  I will try and do better next week. 

N. is getting into his groove as far as school.  He gets up at 6:30 so that he can have breakfast with his dad.  Then he is ready to start school by 7:30.  I am not so ready to start school by then so he does Bible first.  This has worked pretty well except for the fact that some of the bible questions require him to write long answers and he tends to shorten them to the point that they loose their meaning.  The only solution so far is for him to dictate his answers to me,but I really don't like doing that because it takes away his independence.  I just don't know what else to do.  It really won't work for him to type the answers because it is a workbook.  I guess we could keep his answers in a separate notebook, but that seems very disjointed.  The study is a great study, just need to figure out how to make it work for N.

In Science he continues to do very well answering the questions in the Tiner book.  There was a time when the Tiner books put him in tears and he would miss almost all of the questions.  I pointed that out to him this week when he was getting all the questions right or only missing 1.  It is good for both of us to reflect on his progress.

He enjoyed going out and doing some Nature Journaling this week.  He does more of the drawing and not much of the journaling at this point.  Again because it is so time consuming to come back in and try and type something up that it takes some of the joy out of the activity.

Everything else seems to be going well. He struggled a bit with his written narration from Rescue and Redeemed this week, but I think it is because it was a long reading.  That is when his memory issues are evident.  He ended up narrating mostly the first half of the story and I was fine with that.

He is really liking the BJU lit book.  I am enjoying it because through our discussion of the questions at the end of the story I am able to teach some lit elements and see how he is grasping them.  He amazed me with his ability to find some symbolism in some of the stories this week.

In the category of extra curricular he and his Dad worked on a pretty amazing project this week.  N. is a huge fan of parkour and the tv show American Ninja Warrior.  He takes a parkour gymnastics class and spends most hours outside practicing.  He and my dh designed and built a giant set of monkey bars very similar to something you would see on American Ninja warrior.  It has something called a cliff hanger on one side and a giant peg board on the other. I don't know how N. is able to do these things with his CP, but he manages it.

Weekly update for the Week of 8/26/13

This was our 2nd week of MTMM.  I like to be very candid on this blog so I will say the first few days of this week were a little rough.

It started when N. had difficulty with his oral narration from Rescue and Redeem.  He was back to a very general summary instead of a detailed oral narration.  He only used 3 of the key words he was supposed to use.  He and I talked about it and I made it clear what my expectations were.  I don't expect him to use all the words, but he needs to use more than 3! He also struggled in his other subjects and I felt like he was not giving me 100%.  He was getting the work done, but not doing his best work.  We had several conversations about that.  I really think some of it is the age and some of it is being a boy, however as I pointed out to him the Bible is clear that we are to do all things to the glory of the One who made us.  The third day he turned a corner.  Day 3 and 4 were fantastic days. He put his full effort into everything he did.

For his science experiment this week we had the pleasure of having the principal (Dad) home to help with the experiments since they involved fire and chemicals and those thing make me a little nervous.  This is an Independent box, but tremors and chemicals don't go together very well so often we are N's hands and he tells us what to do.

He used the PDF expert app on his Ipad again to type his science experiment and it worked out well.  His experiment didn't work out as expected so he was able to figure out why that might be.

He studied Hudson Taylor this week so his history project was a scroll or in our case a wall hanging that had the word Christian painted in Chinese.

His written narration was also on Hudson Taylor.  I was a little worried about how he would do since the reading was once again in Rescue and Redeem, but he did a great job.

His Worthy Words document this week was a letter by Hudson Taylor about spiritual issues.  This is right up N's alley and we actually were able to have a pretty good Socratic discussion. 

He finished up Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra and started Teaching Textbooks Algebra.  I plan on supplementing this with some problems from other books just to give him some variety. 

First Week of School 8/19/2013

This has been a very full week.  This past weekend we spent the weekend at a getting started weekend with S. at her college.  Wow, talk about emotional.  It was hard and very strange to drive away knowing this was the first step on her way to becoming an independent adult.  We do feel that God has led her to this college and we loved what he heard at this school.  I think they truly do desire to lead the students into a deeper relationship with Christ and the Bible is the ultimate authority on all things. 

On Monday N. and I decided we would go ahead and start school since it would keep us from missing S. so much.  I am so thankful for the familiar layout of the guides.  N. was able to just jump in and start ordering his boxes and reading the instructions.  I did make sure he understood each box, just like I do every year.  He loves the bible study already.  It is a little tricky for him to write on the small lines and we have had some issue with him writing one or two word answers when he should write a sentence or two.  If I ask him what the word means he can tell me the answer in full detail, he just has difficulty writing it.  We are still figuring out a work around for that.  I love hearing him belt out the hymns in full baritone voice.

In Science he has gotten in the groove of the Tiner book about Chemistry and is doing a good job answering the questions.  He did his first lab and was very thorough in following all the safety directions. I love him in his lab outfit. He was able to type his lab report and that went well.  I need to tweak things a little  as far as formatting, but I think it is going to work.

For Storytime we are reading "Under the Hawthorn Tree".  I am still reading out loud to him.  We both enjoy it and it enables him to concentrate on the story and as a result he does a better job on the bookmark follow ups.  These he also types on the Ipad.

My dear dh designed a Word Template for the Presidents notebook to enable N. to type the information for the President's study.  This worked very well.  I can see a skill he will need to grow into is gathering information from a video.  He struggled with that some this week, but I am sure he will improve.

He did a fantastic job on his written and oral narrations this week.  I am hoping that maybe the struggles he has had in the past with these are behind us, but we will see.  He really likes The Story of the World and says it is easy to understand.

The other area that I can see that will be a skill that will come in time is the Socratic Discussion over the Worthy Words (primary source documents).  This week was mainly me modeling it for him.  He is a man of very few words so lengthy in depth discussions are a little out of his comfort zone, unless they are about the bible then he is all about it.

We are finishing up TT Prealgebra and then will move right into TT Algebra.  I plan on adding a few more practice problems, but overall I am pleased with this program.

At the end of the week he told me that once again he enjoyed his first week of school.  That is a successful week in my book.