imagine.more
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Posts posted by imagine.more
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So their philosophy is, you take a bad boy. Make him dig holes in the sun all day. Turn 'im into a good boy.
Let's just hope he gets bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard and doesn't return to harass Anna and the children anymore ;)
I'm sorry but this story just gets crazier and crazier, my cynicism is really getting a boost! And I'm an idealist....I generally am not all that cynical! I like to give people the benefit of the doubt but right now all I want to give JD is a kick in the butt.
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Typically 1.5 years. When we hit that second year and start experiencing the same seasons/holidays again in the same place it feels more like home. I know where to go to watch the 4th of July fireworks, I know where to take the kids pumpkin picking, I know when the summer heat will finally ease up and transition to fall, etc. Also, driving just takes a good year to feel comfortable to me as well and relationships take at least 1.5 years to get going and feel like you have good friends to call in a pinch or for a last-minute girls' night out. Some places we've lived never felt like home but the good places invariably felt like home at the 1.5 year mark.
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I think Mystie on Simply Convivial calls it "Convocation".
I've been looking for an alternative term myself. My 13 year old is a bit old for "Circle Time" lol! And I'm planning to do it at lunchtime this coming year so Morning Meeting doesn't so much work.
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Poor Anna. :(
I was thinking the same thing :(
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The only thing I find shocking about this revelation is that Josh's middle name starts with a J. Do these people hate the alphabet?
Bahaha!
Yeah, this new info about Josh is just, wow, ugh! The layers upon layers of deceit are astonishing to me. Maybe I'm not cynical enough :(
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I agree that AAR is not a full orton gillingham program. The more I learn about it the less I see it working for a child with dyslexia or global learning challenges. My 13 yo dd is like yours in that she's got overall learning disabilities and is working at about a 3rd grade level in math. We're doing Barton and it's working well for us but I can understand that it's a big time and money commitment.
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My DH faints with needles even though he's not scared of them. He's gotten much better with a couple recent things: lie down for the shot and have cold orange juice ready to go afterwards. He doesn't faint anymore and is even gradually able to sit up and feel fine faster and faster.
For the fear, I really was afraid of shots at that age and have gotten much better now. Looking away, talking/joking casually with the doctor, deep breath, and focusing on offering it up (in a spiritual sense). All those have helped me to be much more relaxed about shots and blood draws.
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Our daughter has 4 half-siblings and was placed with us alone. In their situation older brother never lived with birthmom so he was not in foster care anyway. Then younger brother had a paternal aunt totally happy to adopt him but obviously she wasn't technically even related to the girls and had zero space for them. Then older sister has serious behavior problems and requested to be only with a spanish foster home but then ran away and was put in a group home. Youngest sister was born after and nobody knew she existed til birthmom went into labor. So she was placed with a nice local foster family at birth. No reason to move her when they are all she knew for a year and they wanted to adopt.
So in our situation it really worked out best for all involved for the kids to be in different homes. DD has soooo many issues that she requires a lot of our energy to parent and there's no way we could handle her sister safely with other kids in the home. If birthmom ever shows up pregnant we'll happily take the baby but aside from that the current situation will not change.
So yes, keeping siblings together is good in theory but context should always be taken into account. Our DD talks to her siblings weekly and we make a point to visit twice a year as possible. This works and the kids don't actually miss each other in between oddly enough.
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If you want irony, a retained STNR can cause that strong butterfly stroke. That's how my ds is. He's in minnow at the Y as a 6 yo. I was just reading in Stopping ADHD that a retained STNR (which he has) will result in an unusually strong kick and make them unusually good at butterfly and breast stroke, even as the freestyle struggles in comparison. This is exactly the case with ds, which is why it caught my eye. Like the head of the program eyes him and comments on how good his kick is. Then I read it's because of the STNR, lol. Can't win!
Also, strength and tone are not the same. My ds is low tone and quite, quite strong. He's a competitive gymnast now, and his coach comments on how strong he is. Quite strong, definitely low tone, definitely sensory issues.
Check, but you might be able to find info on the STNR tests online. Some of these reflexes confuse me. Anyways, that Stopping book puts HUGE deference to integrating the STNR, saying it affects dysgraphia, dyslexia, all sorts of things. Their claims seem so flourishing, it's almost hard to believe, and yet when you read their profile it SO FITS ds, I figured I was crazy not to run with it. Besides, unlike almost all other therapy programs, this one gives you EVERYTHING you need, right in the book. So literally, if you decided wow that does fit, it's all there. I tried the exercises with dd, whose profile is very different, and she could do them correctly easily the first time. Ds, on the other hand, finds them frustrating, curls his fingers, struggles to keep his head up, etc. They're both labeled ADHD (and the book makes no distinction on subtypes, etc.). It's just in his case the profile of effects of the retained STNR definitely fits. Dd, when I tested her, had some retained ATNR (just a little) and didn't evidence STNR.
Interesting info! I found a decent description of how to test for each of the reflexes. DD is away at Grandma's right now but I think I'll read up and check on those when she's back and see if she has any of those signs. Can't hurt to check! I might test the boys too just for kicks and to be my controls for the experiment ;) Then I can maybe play it off like I'm testing *them* for issues and not her, poor thing already has so many 'issues' I hate to even suggest another one unless I'm sure.
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I downloaded a free Kindle book on dysgraphia that talked about three different kinds of dysgraphia. One was called dylexic dysgraphia, but it wasn't dyslexia. The characteristics of it were strange spacing, letter placement, and the ability to copy neatly but not write original thoughts neatly. My second dd had weird spacing, sometimes strange uses of large writing, never started at the margin, started some letters from the bottom, and I thought the dyslexic dysgraphia sounded like her most of all the different types. She had a convergence and tracking problem, low scores on tests of visual-motor integration, and the hypersensitive type of sensory processing disorder. I took her to OT in first grade and had an eval again in sixth grade, I think. I was so angry about that eval and posted it here. Just like the OP's dd, she is very strong, but the OT tried to tell us she had a muscle weakness problem in the report. She probably did that to get insurance coverage for the OT but a false report wouldn't help me at all. Anyway, there seem to be a lot of similarities between my older dd and yours.
Interesting. Yes the Dyslexic Dysgraphia would sound like Ana, and she has actual Dyslexia too so why not the other kind too ;) Haha! She also doesn't automatically start at the margins either, even when numbering her paper for a spelling test the numbers will float away like this:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
and so on :)
DD does not seem to have any issues with convergence or tracking that I've seen. She does see an optometrist but not a developmental one that would test specifically for that. I'm tutoring a girl with Irlen's Syndrome and it's totally different from tutoring DD. With DD her dyslexia is primarily auditory though of course she did letter reversals and the typical visual dyslexic mistakes or leaving out of letters, but not the way this other girl does and for her it doesn't make much difference what font or color paper or size of font is used. Slightly bigger font is maybe a tiny bit easier but I don't see a big discrepancy in her ability to read words in isolation and words on a regular times new roman font page in a book. The girl I tutor there's this huge discrepancy between the two and I have to be very careful to work on that with her.
Anyway, so Tiramisu, did OT help your daughter? Or did you do anything else that helped more?
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The odd thing is she definitely doesn't have low or weak muscle tone. She's unbelievably strong and is a swimmer, so especially strong in the shoulders and back. She rocks at the butterfly stroke, which most kids find too complicated/physically demanding to excel at. I think, and this is just my layman's guess, that the pencil grip is actually a sensory issue. She's unresponsive to sensory input often....as in she'll sit on someone and not realize it, or bump into someone hard but to her it barely registers and she's confused when they act offended or are kinda pushed aside because to her it felt like just a tap. She also bites/picks at her fingernails and they bleed, but again she doesn't register it really. So I think the overly tight and awkward pencil grip is a combination of sensory issues and now of course habit. Does that make sense?
If I were to have her just keep doing copy work (the rest of her work looks like Grammar Stage vs Logic Stage anyway so why not) would you suggest I stick with print or would cursive help? And would something like Draw Write Now be sufficient or do you think there is a better copy work program I should use/create? I've got baby 5 coming next week so I'm prepping absolutely everything for the year ahead of time right now and making sure that everything is open-and-go as much as possible for the year.
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On the cursive handwriting thread I saw several people mention that the fine motor planning in their kids' writing was not automatic and I realized that may be the term for a small issue I'm seeing in DD13's writing. She has only learned print because she was in public school from K-5th. I have introduced a bit of cursive but she really struggles with that. Her print handwriting is too large for her age but is generally legible and fine. Sometimes it looks quite nice, but there are minor ssues with legibility when it comes to the details like spacing between letters/words (too much or too little) and capitalization and punctuation.
When she does spelling words or dictation from Barton or even just writes letters to friends or helped me label boxes for moving she often makes mistakes and quickly erases and fixes it. of course with boxes we were writing with sharpies so it meant I have lots of crossed out words, lol!
Anyway, it's sometimes a spelling issue where she'll misspell the word, realize it's wrong, and fix it immediately. Here are some examples of times she'll make mistakes:
- it's a spacing issue, as in she'll put letters like this: "du c k" or even "s l a n t".
- other times (this is very common) she'll start to write the capital letters and then realize it's supposed to be lowercase. This is not just with the first letter of words either, it can be in the middle.
- she used to mix up b's and d's in her writing but that is extremely rare now thankfully.
- and then she'll also just shape the letter incorrectly, for example placing the lowercase p such that it doesn't extend below the bottom line, or she'll mess up part of the k
She always fixes these mistakes super super fast, like I barely have time to see what she did and she's suddenly erasing like crazy. She goes through erasers in no time, it's kinda annoying, because she also erases very hard.
Her pencil grip is very poor, it's identical to the 7th picture down on this page, the one where the child is holding a pink marker: http://www.ot-mom-learning-activities.com/poor-pencil-grip.html
We've worked on the pencil grip a bit but she's 13 so honestly I doubt she can totally fix that.
Does this sound like a motor planning issue or something else? Would you even bother trying to fix any of this or just accept that she'll probably always be a bit slow in writing because of her need to constantly erase and rewrite things?
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Cool! My husband thru-hiked the AT between college and seminary. He only had 100 days to hike so he got from GA through Vermont straight through but then ran out of time. He's still hoping to finish VT, NH, and ME someday when we get the chance. One of the thru-hikers from his year wrote a book "Remember the Carrot" which is pretty good and talks about some of the typical people on the trail.
Definitely figure out what filling foods you can manage to pack! My DH lost a lot of weight on the trail, it was just crazy how much all that walking with a pack will drop the weight and at a point you really can struggle to eat enough calories!
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Where we've been stuck for about a year now is that she can sound out the phonemes in CVC, CCVC, and CVCC words. However, blending them back together correctly is a struggle because of the difficulty in discriminating between the consonants. She'll sound out /m/ /a/ /p/ but then is as likely to say "mat" or "nap" as "map". Vowels are no problem because they're lower frequency and so she can hear them. She never guesses "mop" for "map" or "sat" for "sit".
She also has difficulty with rapid naming so even though she knows the letter-sound association, it's not coming out of her mouth as quickly as it should. That's also presumably a factor in the reading struggles.
Hm, this sounds similar to my DD though mine is older so she was able to progress a lot faster. Basically we use mirrors a lot in Barton, especially in the first 2 levels. We'll pause and really look at how her mouth and mine look when we say "Nap" vs "Map" and discuss where her lips, teeth, jaw, and tongue are. I've even had to find videos to show where her tongue should be on different sounds. So it ends up being a combo of speech therapy and hearing therapy and reading therapy all at once. Basically I take her intuitive coping mechanism of lip-reading and extend it to explicitly teach lip-reading so she's even better. We do all lessons with me across from her and I often gesture with my hand to remind her to focus on my lips as I say a word. With your DD's similar hearing loss I'd definitely recommend the same for you. If she's mixing up M and N she's not looking at your mouth enough because those are fairly easy to distinguish by sight though less so by sound. Wait until you get to SH vs CH, ugh, that is the bane of DD's existence because they look the same, it's a matter of a millisecond of how long you hold the sound but the mouth position is identical to look at.
Anyway, I think like OhElizabeth said you can ditch the full script of LiPS and maybe just shorten it up. OR what if you reduce some of the overly verbose instructions into a simple hand signal, like Susan Barton does with the O-G methods where you point to the child to have them repeat, then gesture your hand for them to slowly say the word, then a faster gesture for them to say the sounds fast like a word, etc. So instead of saying "repeat after me" you would just point to her. Even a few hand signals like that can reduce the auditory load on her and hopefully speed things up so she's not frustrated.
If this continues to be a big problem you might consider Cued Speech or Visual Phonics. Have you looked into either of those yet? They're a good solution for kids like ours who are only hearing impaired, not completely deaf, and therefore really can get by with primarily verbal communication but can use additional visual cues to get to 100% accuracy. Hearing aids + lipreading can only ever get them 95% of the way there at best and in practice it's often more like 80-85%.
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sagira, thanks so much for that helpful reply! I was leaning toward 6 b/c Susan Wise Bauer suggested Rod & Staff 6 for 5th grade after the First Language Lessons, but was nervous about overreaching.
I am also encouraged that you are using it for the grammar only; I rang Rainbow Resource to ask about which version and the person I spoke to felt, very strongly, that to use VIE for just grammar would be a waste of money; but I think the child would really not like Rod & Staff at all, and couldn't find anything else that suited our goals.
thanks again!
We use VIE and really like it. Because it spirals around to review grammar concepts each year I'd say you could easily do VIE 6 for 5th grade if your student has not struggled with grammar up until now. On the other hand it's a pretty rigorous program and I don't think VIE 5 would be boring either.
We use VIE without using the composition aspect and I've found it very good, the rainbow resource person is silly ;) It's a good, solid program and at least the 2nd grade one is pretty fun and colorful. My 7 year old does grammar over other subjects still so I see that as a success. I agree with SWB that the composition exercises in any grammar book are random and not age appropriate (like asking 6 year olds to write a whole 1 page research report....why????).
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Maybe I am too old school but I don't think you are doing your son any favors by years of ignoring his bad behaviors. Neither of his brothers like him and you want your dh to spend time with him so you can get a break from him these are serious red flags. It won't be long before it will no longer matter if he is grounded from his friends because any quality friends will no longer want to hang out with him and he will seek out other like minded jerks and then the real trouble will begin.
I was the younger sibling in your example and haven't spoke to the parents (or brother) that allowed me to be bullied and verbally abused in many years.
I completely agree. Allowing bad behavior towards siblings gives it time to develop into a bad habit and will affect the childrens' longterm relationship. I'm the oldest of 3 and my middle sister was often unkind to my brother as a kid, typical jealousy/personality conflict and really her just being an immature kid (aren't we all as kids!) but my parents turned a blind eye, wrote it off as they just didn't get along, and so my brother and sister haven't spoken in years, they have zero relationship whatsoever. They also allowed my sister and I to get away with being unkind and snobby to one another to a lesser degree and so my sister and I aren't as close as we'd like to be, there's just a lot of baggage and not many wonderful memories together to hold us together. We work hard at our relationship now.
If your sons' behavior is only improved while he is grounded I think he should be grounded longer. Next time he wants to go play with friends I'd say "Oh, I'm so sorry but you've been so unkind to your brother that right now we just can't trust you to be kind to friends and other people. You clearly don't know how to be a good brother/friend. We're going to help you work on your relationship with your brother and when we see long-term improvement there we'll let you start practicing being kind with friends as well." And if he asks how long he's grounded for just tell him until you see serious and long-lasting change on his part. I would not give any time period at all, and given his age and the longstanding pattern I would expect it to take a few months of being 'grounded' before he even makes a decent bit of progress.
12 is a good age to tackle this issue, he's old enough to reason with but young enough that you still have a lot of sway. By 16 the boys can just choose to ignore each other and it'll be too late, they may never develop a good relationship after that.
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We moved to Charlotte for those reasons. Low COL, lots of jobs, growing area but not too big and crazy, mild weather, and easy homeschool laws. However it is rather hot and somewhat humid (not as bad as georgia) in the summer. We'd prefer a colder climate but this is livable for us. There are lots of transplants too so you guys would have no trouble breaking into the social scene and stuff.
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I'd be dissuading her from hanging out with those girls just because of the other things you've said, it sounds like they're not great influences and are too quick to ditch her for older/cooler kids.
As for make-up at 8 I would allow my girls to play with it at home no problem or use it for Halloween but not for going out of the house.
My goal personally is for all my girls to know how to apply makeup well and feel comfortable using it for special occasions or to ease the complexion issues that can crop up temporarily in the teen years, but to never feel like they must have makeup on to leave the house. I feel so sorry for women who do not ever leave the house without makeup, or even let their husbands see them without makeup! That's just sad. But likewise I don't want the girls to feel awkward and ill-equipped to use makeup as teens/adults like I did because my mom never taught me how to do makeup. I worry that using makeup too often or too young could lead to that "I'm not pretty without it" mentality which I want to avoid. So that's why I wouldn't let my kids wear it out at 8, plus the whole inappropriateness factor.
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I joined last year because it allowed me to access local homeschool groups that only posted on Facebook. But within a few months I regretted the decision and closed my account. The instant I was on I had all these friend requests from neighbors, old high school friends, and family members. And oh boy, I did not need to know that my neighbor (who took our family pictures and we got along well with) thought the Catholic church was evil and awful and no Protestant leaders should talk to the Pope. I did not need to see constant political ramblings from high school friends on both ends of the spectrum. I did not need to see everyone's kids' naked butt pictures on public social media. I found myself "unfollowing" the majority of my friends for peace of mind. Really all I wanted to see was updates on people's actual lives and their cute kid pictures, I had no desire to debate politics or religion or to see obnoxious, cheesy, and insincere memes about being strong or hugging those you love before they die or whatever. The people I'd have liked to know updates from (those who moved away or whatever) often didn't update much so it really didn't make a difference in how connected I felt to everyone. I now keep one secret account just to access local homeschool or yard sale groups, that's it. Nobody knows I'm on it, it's under a nickname, and hence I avoid all the drama of really being on Facebook :)
Anyway, yeah, I'd pass on Facebook. My mom has a Facebook, and that's just one more reason to avoid it because she's a crazy nutter ;) But honestly, Facebook is getting quite old at this point, fewer teens and tweens are on it because it's full of 40- and 50-somethings with a smattering of 30-somethings. 20-somethings usually have an account but don't use it. So I don't feel like it ages someone to not have a Facebook account.
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1. No, one lesson can take one sitting but most often will take several. With my DD we spend an average of one week (4-5 days) on one lesson. We usually spend 45 minutes on Barton each day.
2. You only need to repeat the lesson with the alternative words if the student needs extra practice, if they seem to not have mastered the concept just yet. You can also go back and re-do the lesson with alternative words if they seem to get it but get to the end and do not pass that portion of the post-test.
3. When they seem to grasp the concept of the lesson. For example when they can read the story reasonably well (not fluently but accurately) and I like to give the spelling lists she posts for tutors online and so I also look for a 90-100% on that spelling test as well to move on. Those are both good ways to check for understanding at the end of the lessons.
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I think like Lecka said the preschool focus would definitely be more on fun crafts, outside time, social play, etc and wouldn't meet any academic needs. But it could give you the mental space to focus on your DS in the mornings and then set aside 30 minutes after lunchtime for your daughter to teach her reading with OPGTR (I like SWB's approach of "do you want to nap or do you want to learn to read" choice :) My older son always chose to learn to read, haha!) ''
I also agree that if preschool doesn't turn out to be the best option for you due to cost or commute there are other ways to get the time you need with both. Our household has a mandatory quiet time from 1-3pm every single day. Otherwise my introverted self would wither up and die! So if for example you could do something like this:
9am-10am DS School / DD Workboxes (check out the Tot School blog for good ideas)
10am-11am DS School / DD Roomtime (we do this with all our napping kids, 1 hour of independent playtime in their room. I use a baby gate and have certain toys they can only play with during room time and I kinda rotate when they seem to get bored every few days)
11am-12pm DS School / DD Video (Super Why, Little Einsteins, Leapfrog Letter Factory, whatever you want but those could be pseudo-educational to assuage any mommy-guilt, haha!)
12pm-1pm Lunch (read aloud to both kids while they eat and have them help you clean up afterwards)
1pm-3pm DS Quiet Time / DD Nap (set aside the first 30 minutes for your daughter to teach her to read with OPGTR or to work on whatever other academic skills you'd like her to work on) **after the 30 minute lesson you have 1.5 hours to work, study, or just be on your own. If you think your DS can handle a true quiet time reading or playing quietly in his room I'd do that but if not just let him watch a movie as a reward for a full morning of schoolwork and it'll give the same effect to you....quiet :)
3pm-3:30pm Snack
And then you've had a full productive day with both kids' needs met and you have the whole afternoon for them to play in the backyard or go to activities or whatever. You can work towards next year having your DS work independently for 1 of his school hours so you can set aside 1 hour for PreK4 for your daughter.
But personally I'm still a fan of preschool :)
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We have this issue big-time as our oldest has an intellectual disability and our second is a very accelerated learner. It helps that they've always been this way since she was adopted but it has created awkwardness when the 5 year old was reading *to* the 11 year old....
We focus on strengths and weaknesses and that the only thing we expect is that everyone work their hardest and keep making good progress in every subject. Also, I have the kids in different math programs. DD uses Math U See which doesn't have grade levels listed per se so she doesn't realize that Gamma is a third grade curriculum and hence the same as DS's Singapore 3A math book ;) The books even have different scopes and sequences so that helps as well. The kids have started to figure out that they're both doing multiplication but at least there's no direct competition related to levels. Similarly they use very different LA curriculums. DD uses Barton for her dyslexia and is doing awesome in it and DS doesn't need phonics so he just reads books and uses Voyages in English for grammar and loves his curriculum just as much. Everyone is happy. I tried combining subjects but DS got too far ahead of DD for that to work, he was bored and she was frustrated and both were comparing too much.
But yeah, I think it all comes back to focusing on strengths and weaknesses and being honest about things while not making comparisons too easy/obvious. DD13 is a fantastic swimmer and very adept at crafts and everyday life skills that DS is nowhere near mastering, so whenever he mentions his academic achievements I try to remind him of the things she's better at than he is. Basically both can really learn from one another.
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I love that, thanks so much for the tip!
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I have considered it and absolutely would if I had the financial means to do so. I will totally admit that DS4's education has been a lot more delayed than I would like because of DD13's remediation needs. He's kinda dyslexic as well so I just cannot handle teaching so many kids to read at once, lol! I've already got DD13 and a 12 year old tutoring student which we need to keep for the income. So DS4 is just now getting going with stuff. BUT, we did do a homeschool co-op (full day) every other week last year and DS4 went to the preschool time and he learned so much! They did this great unit on shapes and everything and he retained so much. So I can totally see how a 3-day a week preschool would be really awesome for him. If I could I would send DS4 and DD2 to preschool actually, lol, they're adorable but kinda pesty during our school day.
I have a friend who sent her son with some mild special needs to preschool (kinda the reverse of what you're saying) and she really liked it, it allowed her time to work with her older daughter while he got the speech help he needed. He transitioned to Kindergarten homeschool at age 6 and it worked out really well because by then her older DD was very independent and it was more doable to homeschool him too.
How old is your DS and how old is your DD? I think if a year or two of your DD doing preschool a few days a week would give your DS enough time to catch up and be a bit more independent then it could really help the whole family.
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Josh Duggar checked himself into rehab
in The Chat Board
Posted
Yeah, I have a 3 week old and I am so angry on her behalf. Regardless of her own possible bad choices in marrying this creep the fact is she is not responsible for his actions and she is still recovering from childbirth! Hormones, physical recovery, sleep exhaustion, caring for four young children, and then you find out your husband has been committed adultery in a premeditated way for the past 2+ years. I cannot even imagine! My husband is rocking our fussy newborn right now while I take a break from nursing...that's what a husband ought to be doing when his wife has just given birth to *his* child!