I recently ran across this article with 50 ways to make writing fun, most of them sensory.

I can really only speak to the children's area. Children are not made to be quiet (within reason). There are lots of toys and games to play. They have puppets and a "puppet stage" for kids to put on shows, a chess game set up for the kids to play, a Lego table, a doll house, a craft table and an audio book corner. This is a great service to us, because the kids can participate in imaginative play with their friends while us moms connect with one another. We all have to go to the library anyway, so why not connect with friends? There are lots of free kids' programs. The local high school special ed program runs a small coffee shop, providing job training to its participants. They have glass cases that children can display whatever they want. They just have to sign up for a time period. The library has bought almost every book that I have requested. Since I have always used literature-based curricula, this has saved me a ton of money. The inter-library load system is fast, and the books available are abundant. They have self check-out. They recently just added computer and internet access to the children's area. The internet is too slow to do much that is worthwhile. I have access to all my account information on line. I can even pay fines online.

I am an SWR-user, not WRTR. But are you sure he needs to memorize all the phonograms before moving on? We don't do that in SWR. We dive into the lists with only the single-letter phonograms memorized. We start List A with a list of about 6 multi-letter phonograms to focus on. Then we add a few more when we do List B. When I do spelling dictation with my kids, I start with a refresher of the phonograms they need to know for that particular session. We work much more on writing them than on recognizing them. Many don't realize that these are two separate skill sets.

My dh is a high school physics teacher. Yesterday, as an intro to series circuits, he posed the following question: Less than half of his students got this right. And they are all Honors kids. So he wants to start including decimals in his classroom to see if he can remediate this problem. We are only barely starting decimals, so I don't have a lot of ideas for him. Can anyone suggest anything that he use in small spurts, or incorporate into his physics curriculum? Websites? Curriculum? Manipulatives? Would the Key to . . . series be useful for this? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Gymnastics is very good for body awareness.

The last time I was asked that question, I put on my confused look and responded, "They are in school," and kept walking.

A running mantra in our house is It is nice to be smart, but it is better to be nice.

Let us know how it goes! Best of luck. :grouphug:

It sounds like you are exhausted. I have gone through times of sleep deprivation (for different reasons), and everything becomes hard, from teaching my children to cleaning my house to running errands. It is difficult to find joy in anything when you are sleep deprived. And when we are not able to start school until after lunch, we get very little done. My kids' prime time is in the morning until lunch. And the only way they do very much after lunch is if they know they are almost done. Is there any way you can get to bed earlier so that you don't have to go back to sleep in the morning? Is there any way you can have your kids work independently in the morning so that they have some work behind them when you get up?

My dd8 was like this, too. She wanted to recite the whole passage word for word, and everything seemed equally important to her. I had to give her more explanation than the book directs you to do. I had to explain to her that the questions that are asked are "hints" as to what to put in the summary. I also had to explain to her about the different kinds of summaries and what they meant. A summary of the central narrative thread is about what happened, while a summary of the central details seeks to pick out the most important parts of a description. We have spent time talking about why each type of summary is appropriate for the given passage. We have read through the samples and talked about why certain certain parts were included and others were excluded.

SWR is a very, very thorough program. It does not emphasize sight words at all, but rather starts with a thorough phonics/rule analysis for each word and then works toward fluency in that word. A typical day would look like this: Work on memorizing the sounds of individual phonograms Spelling dictation. You give the student a word and let the student know if the word is spelled differently than it is pronounced ("think-to-spell"), The student determines syllables and then sounds out each syllable. You hold up your fingers to show how many letters each sound represents (for example, 2 fingers for TH, 3 fingers for IGH, etc.) and clarify any points of potential confusion (such as pointing out whether to use K or C for the /k/ sound). You make sure the student knows how to spell the word before she writes it down. Student then dictates the same word to you while you spell it. After dictating all words for the day, the student reads the words, and you will give a quiz of those same words. For struggling readers, it is encouraged to read the spelling lists often so that they become automatic. Yes, they eventually memorize the words, but that memorization has its foundation in word analysis, rather than just rote memorization. Here is a of how SWR works for the age you are needing it for. With a student who has special needs, it is not always going to look the same. SWR is very flexible to accommodate different learning styles. You can play games. You can do it standing at a white board. You can even do it in a sandbox if you want. My dd8 is a slow processor (we think), and it took quite a bit of training to get to a point where we go through this process relatively efficiently. But it has been really worth it. She consistently tests a year ahead on her diagnostic tests. She is by no means a natural speller, so she clearly needs the thorough analysis in order to remember the words.

I grew up in the western suburbs, and I still have family there. Can't give much in the way of advice, but it is a lovely area to raise a family in.

I use paperbackswap.com, and books get lost by USPS all the time if you do not use delivery confirmation. I just purchase delivery confirmation as a matter of course now. And in the case of a sale, there is nothing keeping the person from claiming that they didn't receive it, even if they did, just so they can get it for free. When I buy books from places like Amazon, if I don't receive it, they always refund my money or send another, no questions asked. That is what people have come to expect. But 3 weeks is not nearly enough time to demand a refund.

My dd8 is doing WWE3 this year. It is hard for her, even though she is pretty advanced in language arts. And there is no way she could have jumped into WWE3 without first having done WWE1 and 2. I would at least go back to WWE2, because that is where they start with dictation. It starts by doing copywork one day and then writing the exact same sentence from dictation the next day. WWE has a beautiful way of gradually progressing a child through the steps he needs to get to the point where they can do WWE4.

I have really enjoyed the spelling-first philosophy. That way, even if you have a struggling reader, they are still learning phonics and how it is used so that when it finally clicks, they have all the tools they need to move forward very quickly with reading.

I agree, except that I would put off learning letter names until later and just learn letter sounds. If he had a hard time with learning letter names, he would be better served by learning the sounds first and the names later. When a child struggles with letters, you really don't need the letter names cluttering up his thinking when he is learning how to read.

I have both, but we have ended up using only the CD's since we are also using TOG. We listen to the CD's so much that when my children were disagreeing about a particular historical event, my 5yo stated emphatically, "But Jim Weiss said . . .!"

The very first one about the Revolutionary War was scheduled as a read-aloud in Tapestry of Grace when my dd was 6yo. I really enjoyed reading it to her. She is 8yo, and she has read all of them all multiple times now and is about ready to move on. She had a delightful time with them. I refused to read them all, though. So they were what got dd reading chapter books on her own.

If a student is doing copywork he cannot read, he might as well be copying a foreign language. (Try copying something from a foreign language that you are unfamiliar with if you want to know what it is like for your dc.) I am not sure what one would get out of that.

Our 6' x 9' wall map is wall-papered to our wall, so that is not going to get updated any time soon. But when South Sudan was created, dd8 just made an overlay of the country to stick to the map. :) We are using 10-yr-old atlases that were gifted to us. It is good for the kids to see how the countries have changed in such a short amount of time.

We have used WWE from the beginning, and I have always felt that it was the right curriculum for us. But as we started WWE3, I felt like we were getting really lost with the narrations. Dd8 just didn't get how to do those summaries. I could ask her the summary questions, but she did not understand how she would otherwise know what to put in the summary. So a few weeks ago, I started to share with her all of the information in the manual that appeared to be for the teacher. Most especially, we concentrated on the stated focus of each lesson. We talked about what it meant to identify the central narrative thread, the central details or the central theme, and why that particular focus was appropriate for the given passage. Lately, as she has been doing other assigned reading, she has started to figure out what kind of summary is appropriate for the book she has read. I didn't ask her to do this, though it would have been a good idea had she not thought of it on her own. But I am just so excited that this has started to click for her that I wanted to share in case it is a help for someone else.

If I had to work under those conditions, I would absolutely need to get away and work in a quiet place. Maybe it is overstimulating to him, and he does want and need to work in his room, but he is not ready to work that independently yet.

Even a doctor could not make that assessment without a lot more information, and perhaps some testing.

They usually require a SoF, which I am not in favor of (though religious is okay). I don't want other people teaching academics to my children when they are young, but I would be okay with it at middle or high school age. Similar to (2), I prefer a social co-op that doesn't meet during school hours. They are too expensive. They require too much of my time (see #3). I am an introvert and am really overstimulated by large groups. My kids would have the same (2e) academic issues in a co-op as they would in school. It is hard enough to teach my own kids. I don't really want to teach other people's kids.

Your younger is not too young for cursive. I taught my dd8 cursive when she was 5.5yo (after teaching manuscript first). My now 5yo is writing in cursive (skipped printing with him), and he is by no means advanced. We used a curriculum designed for younger kids, and it worked great..