I wouldn't want to use it without the workbook. All of the exercises are in there.

Our insurance specifically excludes education testing so I'd definitely call insurance to check benefits ahead of time. Ours also excludes all therapy for developmental disabilities and vision therapy. I'm thinking of going through the school district to get my 7 yo son tested for dyslexia so I do not have to pay out of pocket. I'm not sure I want the headache of dealing with the school district though. We did go through them for testing for our 3 yo and they weren't that well done so we are pursuing private evaluations anyway. Our policy is self funded and I've noticed it tends to cover a lot less than a policy that is fully funded. Fully funded policies are subject to state mandates while self funded policies are not. None of my son's autism therapies are covered despite living in a state with an autism mandate because our policy is self funded.

We just switched to WWE and are using WWE 3 for my dd who just turned 11 a few weeks ago and will be 6th grade this fall. We're schooling this summer but we may still have a little of WWE 3 to do in the fall for 6th grade. I can see her writing skills improve since we've started it so that helps a lot even though she is "behind". It definitely is not too hard anyway and it's one of dd's favorite things to work on. She also takes an outside writing class so she does plenty of writing.

I'm pretty sure the last time my dh wore a tie was to interview for the job he has. He usually wears polos, jeans, and steel toes boots but should really probably dress up more. He is a lab manager and frequently mistaken for one of the maintenance workers. :tongue_smilie: I don't think ties are worn by anyone though because of the risk of them getting caught in lab equipment.

We use Nordic Naturals Liquid with good results with my 3 year old son. I tried just about every chewable out there for ds. He normally likes chewable meds but not for fish oil anyway. He actually did okay with the Nordic Natural strawberry chewables until the oil squirted one day and then he refused them after that. I usually put the fish oil in juice but it floats to the top. Ds mainly drinks out of sippy cups so he doesn't notice it. If ds would eat applesauce or yogurt I think I'd try to mix it in with that.

That's wonderful! My ASD son used to give kisses before he regressed. I really miss them.

I would try to get into Regional Center as soon as possible. I have a friend in CA with a 2 yo son with Autism. She has Kaiser and they refused to pay for any therapy but she was able to get 38 hours of ABA, 1 hour Speech, and 1 hour OT a week for her ds. It is all paid by Regional Center. I only wish I could get that kind of services for my ds. He gets 4 hours of ABA and 1 hour of OT a week and we pay 100% of the cost (We have self funded policy from Cigna and they have completely sucked as far as paying for anything- they've denied everything except psych visits). Ds gets 1 hour of speech a week through the school district and that is the only thing we don't have to pay for. Your ds sounds a lot like my ds at age 2 however my ds did not get an autism diagnosis until age 3 and he had a regression shortly before his 3rd birthday. If he had not had that regression I'm not sure that he'd have gotten the autism diagnosis.

My 4 yo loves AAR. She is always asking for me to work on it with her. It is easy to pull together each day and has a lot of fun activities. My dd is already rhyming words and gets so excited when she gets them right. None of my children have been early readers though. I keep waiting for one that just picks it up really easily but that hasn't been the case with any of my kids yet. 2 of my 4 older kids really really struggled to read. I am already homeschooling 3 other children plus I have a 3 yo with Autism. My 4 yo can tend to get lost in the shuffle. She loves Ziggy the Zebra and I think the coloring pages that go with the program are really fun. Each one has a little art activity that gets her excited but they are always easy things I can pull together quickly. Like for the letter D we used a pencil eraser and paint to add spilled dogfood to the picture but dd loved it. I also really like all of the phonemic awareness activities. It's not just about learning your ABCs. To reuse the program the only thing I will need to purchase is another student book which I think is around $25. I did get the deluxe package but you could probably save money by getting the basic package. I think you can buy the zebra puppet on Amazon or you can use your own. My dd adores Ziggy though.

I'm pretty sure my almost 7 yo son is dyslexic. My husband is and so is my oldest dd. With my dd I felt like we floundered for years trying to address a lot of her issues. She did vision therapy for a year when she was 7 and that really helped get her started reading but she still had a hard time. When she was 12 we put her through PACE and Master the Code which helped a lot. She's attending PS this year and gets mostly As but she is a slow worker. I'm trying to figure out what would be a good home program to do with ds right now. I've been looking at Barton and LiPS (I'm open to other suggestions too). If I go with LiPS I'm a little confused about what I'd need to order. We have been working on CVC with my son since last summer and he just can't grasp it. Yesterday he did the first page on ETC 1 1/2. I got him the 1/2 level since he had trouble with ETC 1. He loves doing ETC even though it's hard for him though. He was in tears yesterday because the new book is too hard. The words on the first page are hat, jam, tag, pad, and can. A lot of the words it seemed like he was just guessing and he got so many of the sounds wrong. When I drill him with flashcards though he knows all of his sounds and he can blend well once he has the right sounds. Ds has done MFW K, HOP K, ETC 1, and we're currently working on IEW PAL. HOP K was horrible because he started picture guessing during that program. He'll guess what he's supposed to say based on the pictures. I had bought PR1 thinking that would be a good fit with it's lack of pictures but after looking it over I don't think it would be a good fit for ds. He loves PAL but we're only on lesson 5 so haven't gotten into much of the reading part of it yet. Also complicating this is ds has some minor speech issues. It isn't very apparent when he's just talking but when he's trying to sound out words he can't make some of the individual sounds. He cannot say the 'j' sound. It comes out as 'ts'. He also cannot do something like 'ch' so trying to teach him words that have ch in them is extremely difficult. I really cannot afford to do Vision Therapy with ds right now. I think we could probably swing it in 7-8 months. My younger son's therapy is really draining us right now. I did call insurance and of course they don't cover vision therapy nor do they cover speech delays. Our school district will do testing for homeschoolers but won't provide services for them. On the speech issue I could possibly have them do the testing and pay for private speech.

My oldest 2 are 5th and 7th grade this year and both wanted to go to school but in the end only my 7th grader went. My 5th grader decided to she didn't want to go to the grade school for just one year and she'd go next year for 6th. Both are homeschooling next year. So much of it was they didn't feel like they had any friends last year. This year for my 5th grader she became really good friends with a homeschooled 6th grader. They have become just wonderful friends and do a lot of things together. My dd was also able to be in a play at a private school (part of her push for ps was to be in a play). She stopped asking to go to school a few months ago and I think it is because she has plenty of social activities and a few good friends to hang out with. My 7th grader has had just a terrible year at PS in some ways I regret sending her. She was so excited to go because she had always been homeschooled. The kids behavior is just horrible and I haven't been very impressed at the level of work the kids are doing. I always felt like I wasn't doing enough at home but my dyslexic 13 yo has As in everything but Math which a subject she has always struggled with. She hasn't made any really great friends either. The one girl she considered her best friend starting making fun of her and started ignoring her. At least she is now hanging out with my younger dd's friends but I'm really trying hard for next year to get her connected with other homeschooled teens. I have her signed up for CC Challenge Program and she is going to participate at our Co-ops teen program. I'm really hoping she'll find a good friend or two one of these places.

My younger ds is a sensory seeker. If his sensory needs are not met then he just finds dangerous things to do. His preschool teacher has even commented how ds can always find the most dangerous thing wherever they are. We try to provide a lot of things to provide sensory input for ds. When he gets his needed input he is much calmer and easier to handle. About a month ago we got ds a 55" trampoline and set it up inside. He spends a great deal of time jumping each day. Even dh who wasn't thrilled with the new addition to our already crowded main floor agrees ds is calmer. Ds also has a steamroller machine that provides the deep pressure he craves.

I actually considered having my twins do separate phonics programs just so I could try two programs out. :tongue_smilie: It really must be some kind of sickness because prepping two programs is way more work. I was going to do PAL with ds and PR 1 with dd. It's probably a good thing they both got super excited about the Farm Folder so now we're just doing PAL. I probably don't even need that though since we're going to continue onto MFW 1 this summer so it's probably overkill as is.

We dropped TT here because it just didn't work for my 11 year old. She hated the voice on the program and was constantly fast forwarding it and not listening to explanations. If I did not sit with her she would skip over the explanations on any problems she got wrong. I also did not like how they explained some of the concepts. My dd could not grasp the way they explained fractions. I did not like how long division is introduced late in TT4 and then did not give my dd enough practice to reinforce it. We switched to Saxon and it's going much better except it's hard for me because it requires much more time on my part. I really miss that aspect of TT. My oldest dd did fine with TT though and it worked fine for her so I think it depends on the child. She'll be doing Saxon Algebra 1/2 at home next year but that's mainly because she is doing it with CC Challenge B otherwise I'd have likely gotten TT for her. I purchased the DIVE CD to go with Saxon and my dd has begged not to use it. I think she just doesn't do well with computer based math programs. That is why I'm glad there are so many options out there for math.

Coverage seems to vary widely depending on where you live and what kind of insurance you have. There are a lot of states with insurance mandates for autism coverage. Here in Maryland there is a mandate requiring insurance companies to cover OT and ST but not behavioral therapy. However if your insurance policy is self-funded like ours then they are exempt from the mandate. Luckily ours does specifically include OT and ST in our policy but I am still fighting to get payment from Cigna for my son's OT. There is no coverage for any kind of behavioral therapy. At least in my area I've found OT to be slightly cheaper than VT. My oldest did VT 6 years ago so I'm going by that I'm sure rates can really vary. Speech Therapy is more and runs $75 per half hour at my son's clinic. Right now we are only doing OT there. It is $100 per 50 minute session but they'll give us a 10% discount if we prepay for a month at a time. The place we go does not do payment plans aside from the initial eval which is $650. They actually don't take insurance at all but I submit it for out of network reimbursement. My son gets one hour of speech a week through the school district. I haven't seen much improvement from that but we're sticking with it for now. My son also attends our districts special ed preschool which so far has been okay. I'm not sure what we'll do for K. Our school likes to do inclusion and if ds had a one on one aide like a lot of kids get then I may leave him at the public school. My son was just diagnosed in March and honestly I've been very disappointed in how little is covered. Absolutely no behavior therapy is covered which would probably be a big benefit to my son. There is a program here that covers it called Maryland Autism Waiver but it take 8 years to get on it right now. My son will be starting Applied Behavioral Analysis 2 mornings a week and we will pay 100% of the cost. Just doing 4 hours per week will run us around $700 a month. We also use as Defeat Autism Now doctor and I have been able to get the office visits for that covered but the doctor is an MD and gives me forms to bill insurance. She does not use the autism code on anything I've gotten from her which seems to help with reimbursement. Most of the lab testing has not been covered nor is the $250 we spend on supplements each month. I was surprised that his methyl B12 prescription got paid for so at least they covered something. We have actually seen the most improvement from the biomedical treatments of anything we've done so far.

I like both programs although I haven't used HOD yet but I just purchased CTC for dd11 for next year. I like how everything is laid out for the day and I'm hoping dd can do some of it independently. The box layout was such a turn off more me when I first looked at samples I said I'd never use HOD. I'll be continuing with MFW for my twins. We'll be starting 1st grade soon and I have Adv waiting to do after that. I think I may switch them to bigger if I wind up liking CTC next year.

I have 2 laminators. The one I usually use just does standard size sheets and I use that for flashcards, game pieces, or book covers. I make a lot of books for the kids with my comb binder and I usually laminate the covers. I got one that will take a 12" wide sheet to make file folder games. I use that pretty much exclusively to laminate the file folder when I'm done making the game.

A: Sheet has letter and alligator- color and add buttons or goggly eyes to alligator. B: Sheet has letter and beehive- dip eraser in blue paint and add blueberries to B and add grass using green paper to bottom C: Sheet has letter and cat- paint letter light brown and add choc chips made with paper D: Sheet has letter and dog- color and use pencil eraser dipped in paint to make spilled dogfood next to dish F: Sheet has letter, frog, and pond- add fish to pond using thumbprint (color thumb with orange marker)- add details for fish with pen then color rest of picture There is also a wagon sheet for lesson 3 which is used with the cards. We just finished F and my dd loves it so far. Most everything is in the tm you could probably find some freebie alphabet sheets to sub for the missing sheets. The student sheets so far have been mainly a fun art project for dd.

I waited too long. My dd got hers right at 11 and I thought I still had time. I hadn't gotten mine until much later.

We still have 13 days left here. I can't wait to have my oldest back home again. She'll be homeschooling next year. It's been a rough year but she's want to finish it out.

Can you easily add pages to the ProClick? I'm tempted even though I have a comb binder because it is hard to add pages. I also want to make homemade books of time for 4 of my kids and want to use cardstock for those. I haven't tested out the comb binder yet to see how it does with cardstock.

My ds's OT loaned us one to try and ds hasn't really liked it. He is also a sensory seeker that loves deep pressure. If you try one I'd just get your own vest and add weights. That is what the one we borrowed is like and the OT said it was way cheaper to do that way. The main problem we have is that ds just won't leave it on. My ds loves jumping so we got him a 55" trampoline we have set up inside. He's definitely been easier to manage since we got it. For deep pressure we just ordered him steamroller from South Paw on the recommendation of his OT. It was kind of pricey but grandma generously offered to get it for him. I'm really hoping it will help with his need for deep pressure.

I got into homeschooling because we were in a bad district but have since moved 4 times since then. Our current district is rated okay but my oldest who is currently attending PS has had a miserable year. The behavior of the other kids is horrible and I'm so sick of teachers punishing the entire class for a couple kids acting up. My dd recently got lunch detention and came to find out she hadn't done anything to get it. A few of the kids were being rowdy so the teacher gave the whole class (over 30 kids) detention. I could go on for a long time. There is so much time spent on test prep (daily in LA and Math) until the state assessment testing anyway. There is very little writing and on the few writing assignments dd has had the teachers provide zero feedback on the feedback. Writing a score at the top with no comments doesn't teach dd how to improve her work at all. She'll be home next year. And while we had planned to send the kids for high school I'm now researching homeschooling through high school.

I voted other. I don't make my kids drink milk. I grew up in a family that required drinking milk at dinner. My sister and I are both lactose intolerant and we've both stopped drinking milk as adults. I didn't realize all the stomach aches I got as a child were from milk. We've generally had milk in our house until recently. I have a couple kids that like to drink it but we just took our ASD son off dairy so we currently don't have cows milk to drink. We do have almond milk and some of the kids do drink it occasionally. Since it is more expensive I do try to limit it.

I am using IEW PAL with my 6 yo twins and AAR Pre-1 with my 4 yo. I just bought PAL at convention 2 weeks ago so we haven't done too much with it yet but from doing the first 4 lessons it seems to be working well for my son. Right now I just haven't used it long enough to do much of a review. It isn't as sight word based as I thought it might be. The first lesson introduces the words yellow and green and while they are sight words the student learns the 'ow' and 'ee' phonograms and adds them to the farm folder. IEW has quite a few sample pages that can be viewed from their website. I love the PAL Farm Folder. It is what really sold the program to me. I bought the twins each their own folder and they are already very excited about filling the folder up. We review the phonograms we've added on the folder daily and they seem to be sticking. I love AAR Pre-1 as well. It is perfect for my dd that still needs to work on her letter sounds. I also love all of the phonemic awareness activities in the program. We are moving slowly though (dd won't be K until the fall of 2012 so we really only work when she is asking for schoolwork). Waiting for the next levels of AAR shouldn't be a problem for her.

My 3 yo goes to Pre-K every school day for 3 hours. Before he started going in January I had a heck of a time getting school done with him around. He wasn't napping anymore and he screeches constantly (due to special needs). I feel so rushed during those 3 hours like I must get everything done during that time. He is even approved for extended school year that meets the month of July so there are only a few weeks this summer he'll be home all week. He has ASD and SPD and has a knack for finding dangerous things to do. I really cannot count on getting much one on one schoolwork done while he is home. Now my 4 yo has always been as easy as can be. She's one of those kids that can spend hours playing with stuffed animals or dolls and has since she was around 2.