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.