Update for the week of 1/14/13

I haven't posted since we started back after Christmas because we have had sickness going through the house and some rough days.  I want to be real on this blog and I will say the past 2 weeks have been rough.  N. has seemed to have difficulty getting back in the grove and I have been frustrated with his lack of progress in things like written and oral narration this year.  I have had to take a step back and spend some time in prayer and try not to let him see my frustration.  I haven't always succeeded at that.

He is back to drawing with Draw and Write and that he continues to love.  He drew Sacajawea since he has been learning about Lewis and Clark.

His history project last week was making a drawing of a bird he would find in our area and he modeled it after the examples of Lewis and Clark journals that he saw.  He picked the Chickadee to draw since right now we have many of them at our bird feeders.

This week's history project was a Mola.  I am not sure that he did it right, but he was pleased with the end result.

In storytime we are almost at the end of the book about Seaman the dog that traveled with Lewis and Clark.  The readings in this are very long and at times he had trouble oral narrating due to his memory issues,  but overall he did ok, just not as much detail as I would like to see.

In Science things have been tough this week.  I usually  help him quite a bit when he has to build a new project.  His hand tremors just won't allow him to use a glue gun safely or to place very small objects on things.  This week he was to build a scale and it was very frustrating.  Many things went wrong and after tears of frustration on my part we ended up letting Dad figure out a different way to do things when he got home.  The next day we had similar frustrations, but finally were able to get the scale built.  This has been the only thing in the science that has caused a problem, so don't think I don't like the science because we do, but again I want to stay real with this blog.

As I mentioned his written narrations seem to have hit a plateau this year.  I look at examples of other dc's narrations and they are light years ahead of his.  I know I shouldn't compare, but it is tough at times to realize he isn't up to where he should be.  I have tried various things and this week we may have found the winner.  I am letting him use his Ipod to record audio notes as he reads.  He stops every so often and records what stood out to him of what he has read so far.  The idea is that he can then listen back and it will refresh his memory as to what he has read. This also helps because he has to stop every so often and think about what he just read it seems to help his comprehension and attention to detail.  The other thing we both realized is that just the act of him verbalizing what he has read seems to cement it in his brain.  He told me with his science narration that he really didn't need to listen back to the recording much at all.  He remembered it all. As I told my dh this we both realized that we both are like this. If I want to remember something I have to say it out loud.  My dh either does this or he takes notes after every few paragraphs or he says there is no way he can remember it.

I often feel pretty alone in this journey with ds since he doesn't fit into any learning challenges category and even the doctors don't know what to tell me.  Thankfully I have a God who knows my ds inside out so I just keep asking Him to guide me as I educate him.