That's neat, in which video does she talk about the writing sample? Maybe I could convince one or more of my parents of dyslexics at the school/co-op I teach at to send in a sample and get tutoring for their kiddos!

Ours doesn't do that. My husband works for the BSA and I don't think any of his troops or packs do that. All are supposed to sell popcorn (it's the main source of funding to keep the program cheap) but that pie in the face thing sounds silly and a bit disrespectful to me. Fine if others want to do it but we'd probably skip it like you.

I'd say light brown/strawberry blonde.

Yes we do have snow. It's Northern Virginia. We don't own or plan to own a snow blower, we usually just shoveled when we lived in Pennsylvania until recently.

I've heard about this. How much does it cost (ballpark?)

Yes, this is what we've been trying to do the past couple months. i've taken some pics of it during downpours and such and we're keeping tabs of where the gravel is washing out and such. There is a ditch on the upper side of the driveway. However, there was nothing diverting water into it from where it's truly running down across the road. So maybe 50% or less was going into the ditch. This ditch has some large rocks in it but it had become a bit overgrown and hadn't been kept up in the year or so before we moved in. Currently we're working on improving that a bit while we investigate the drainage patterns and try to gather ideas on how to deal with the driveway.

Has she had dyslexia remediation? Like specific tutoring or Orton-Gillingham work? I'd definitely do the math placement test just to be sure. I've made assumptions about my kids' math level in the past and really regretting not taking the placement test to be sure they were in the right level. If she needs to backtrack a bit just spin it as "Since you're starting back with a different curriculum than the public school we want to be sure you don't have any gaps in your math knowledge. If it's too easy you can absolutely do it quickly and move on to the level that's more challenging for you." My daughter has moderate-to-profound hearing loss so I can relate on the hearing stuff :)

We just moved into a new house up in the mountains and it's in a neighborhood but a rural one, so there are about 2 miles of gravel roads leading up to our house. They're pretty well maintained so not a big deal. But our driveway is a pain in the butt already. It's on a slope and the neighbor's house across the street and above ours (literally, like they're at the top of the hill) drains right onto ours. Not their fault or ours, just how the neighborhood was built before we got here. So, every time it rains these deep gullies emerge down the tire tracks of our sloped driveway. It's awful! But we don't know how to even put in a drain. Do we do one across the top at the entry of the driveway? I have no idea. Then there are the wandering gravel rocks in the yard :-/ I've considered putting some sort of edging in, maybe bordering it with landscaping timbers or bricks or even just the flexible garden edging. But, I don't want to spend the time/money if it's not going to help a decent bit. So....any gravel driveway-owning people here who could give us advice?

Amen! I think that's part of why I felt the need to start the interactive notebooks. I was just so bored and lamenting the fact that our homeschool looks *nothing* like what I want because my DD's needs obviously take precedence and make certain things not a possibility. BTW if any other Level 5 Barton people are bored and wanting to incorporate some science/history stuff but using mostly Barton-approved words feel free to pm me and I can email you a few little packets I've been working on. I just finished one on the planets. No earth-shattering academic info, but I needed to start really implementing vocabulary words for my daughter and improve her background knowledge without needing to read everything aloud to her. (she's deaf so audiobooks are out, she can only understand 85% of what I read aloud and maybe 60% of what she hears on her iPod)

Me! :) I mean, I love Barton but then I hate it too. It's extremely boring and very difficult to do with my DD who has additional disabilities. It works for her, even if she doesn't make the fast progress you see in neurotypical kids who just have dyslexia. But seriously, she was totally illiterate 2 years ago and now she reads, like really reads. We're also halfway through Level 5 so I think there must be something about this level, and maybe just about being halfway through the program. It feels like we've been doing this forever but still have forever to go. Also, we're still needing to use simple readers, I can't really just let her loose with chapter books indiscriminately because then she slips back into bad habits of guessing because too few of the words are decodable for her. Anyway, I can relate. I really can. I say maybe try a 6 weeks on-1 week off approach, kind of like the Sabbath schooling a bunch of homeschoolers have been trying. That way you can build in regular breaks while not having the backsliding that happens with longer OG breaks. I've also found it helpful to add in an Interactive Notebooking element to our Barton tutoring. This gives me, and my students, a way to really visualize how far they've come, to reference old rules, and a convenient way to keep track of their words, phrases, and sentences that they write within the lesson. We also like to do the Spelling Success games, they're really excellent and pretty affordable. My non-dyslexic kids enjoy playing them too and they're random enough that an older or non-dyslexic person can play with your dyslexic student and he's not at a huge disadvantage. Also, sometimes it helps when I get discouraged to map out our long-term plan again. It helps me to see that, while DD going into 8th grade "feels" very late and like we're running out of time we truly have 5 years and she can finish Barton in 2 years even with her slow pace, then we can move on to the next stuff and she's on point to meet my goals for her.

Well it's just held in the church basement, no library, etc and only 12 hours total a week so not much down time for the classes. Luckily she has younger siblings so she reads aloud to them but mostly sticks to the 1-3 year olds because even my 5 year old has started correcting her reading accuracy/pronunciation.

Bluebonnet, her only current interest is that she likes working with children. She's hoping to maybe become a preschool teacher's aide someday and I think with work she can do that. Right now she's lacking the maturity to work towards that in the logical ways (babysitting and such on her own) but she's good with kids in general and so we try to encourage those things. If she's unable to make that work, it'd likely be due to an inability to work independently enough, like making good decisions on the fly, or inconsistency with work attendance/attitude. The backup would be housekeeping sorts of jobs because with motor skills she's right on point for her age range and always has been. Fine motor lagged a tiny bit but I think that was due to lack of trying because now those have improved a lot.

Thanks for the ideas Elizabeth! I'm definitely going to check out the listography stuff. Oh, and they don't have a nursery actually. They have volunteers (other moms and teens) who watch the little kids at their houses nearby in town. It's just a few kids of the teachers that are watched so luckily not a big group nursery/daycare situation because I agree those can be festering pools of germs, yuck! Terabith, it might be a bit difficult in that the other kids will notice but she won't really care or register that it's odd. She usually didn't actually do the work in public school either. She just hung out with the teacher and giggled with friends at her seat and then when the special ed parapro came around they'd help her do the worksheets or tests. I am going to try to keep her in-class assignments to paper-and-pencil when possible so she looks like she's doing age-appropriate work. I'm also going to briefly explain to the class (it'll be about 10-12 homeschooled kids) that because of her hearing impairment she needs different curriculum so she's going to just work on her own stuff while they learn the typical school stuff. I find that generally people are more understanding and less judgmental when we just point out the hearing impairment....then she's not dealing with the stigma of the intellectual disability label. People can see the hearing aids and they're really good about that, though they still often don't 'get' that she can't hear them if they talk behind her :001_rolleyes: Plus homeschoolers are really chill about learning differences I find.

I like the idea of color-by-numbers with math problems. My 8 year old LOVES those pages when they come up in his Singapore curriculum. Cracks me up but it's like the funnest thing :P I could find/make some with multiplication problems to keep those fresh while she is learning division with MUS Delta. The fill-in-the-blank journal might work. That could even help her with creating complete, sensible sentences. We're currently working on that with Lindamood Bell's Visualizing and Verbalizing but any extra practice could help. I forgot I had a thought a bit ago to make up comprehension questions to go along with the Barton stories. I could even pull from Level 4 so they're review and add in some basic questions. (I know there's a comprehension add-on, but finances are tight right now...hence the job). ...off to check out the Critical Thinking company's workbooks!

Yes! I was disappointed in the last season because the style changed so much with the different writers on board. Now that it's Palladino I think this will be good. Plus, after a decade in Gilmore Girls withdrawal I'll take whatever scraps they'll toss out honestly :drool5:

Ooh, that would be nice! I could ask the church secretary, but the 'school' is pretty new and just held out of the church basement. It's like a homeschool co-op as far as official status but run more like a Catholic school with uniforms and everything.

Sorry, I was posting on my phone earlier and couldn't type a long reply. OneStep, we do have some Spelling Success games. I think the spelling rules ones for Level 4 have a version she can play independently? I'll have to check that, thanks for reminding me! I have a bunch of "Let's Read About Science" picture books that are quite informative and colorful. I think she could mostly read them independently but I'd need to come up with some actual interaction with it so I can check for understanding. She tends to read books and then be baffled when I expect her to remember anything about it. I'm thinking maybe I could have her do vocabulary activities to go along with them? Not sure. She wouldn't understand journaling. She thinks "writing" means to actually copy down words. She copies song lyrics for fun in her journals at home. She does crochet a bit, nothing complicated yet but she does well with it and picked it up quickly. I bet she would benefit from some regular time set aside to work on crocheting. Maybe I could give her a task like to crochet a scarf and a little book of instructions. I'm hoping she can occasionally participate in some of our science stuff, but it's pretty heavily reading-and-writing based. Seton's kind of insane with its writing requirements, lol! If anyone else has ideas please keep them coming! I'd love to get a good collection of ideas so I can try things out, rotate, and try something different if a few of the ideas turn out to fall flat for her.

I like the idea of art. She could bring her chalk pastels and drawing pad. Those clean up easily with baby wipes and she can work on small projects that'll transport in her backpack. Maybe I could do something on the primary/secondary colors too...like a color wheel

I recently was hired by a hybrid school/homeschool (kind of like a university model school) and I'm really excited. I will be teaching 3 days a week and the kids will come with me....the little ones to childcare and the big ones to enroll in the school. Except Ana, because she cannot handle the curriculum (this school uses Seton). She won't be enrolled but will sit in my class (which is the grade she technically is in) and do her own work while I teach. Right now my plan is to do her MUS Delta lesson introduction Sunday evenings and then have her practice the concepts while I check her work and answer questions all week, taking the test on Friday. She does well with MUS. Still needs help with an average of 2 word problems each time but otherwise can do it fairly independently after she grasps the lesson. We'll do Barton 6+ (she's halfway through level 5 now) after school and on Tues/Thursdays when there is no school mostly. I'd like to have her practice independently so I got her a couple of the Barton chapter books and am making a series of fluency sentences for her to practice during school. She'll also independently read some Sonlight selections for ~30 minutes during her time at school. I have 4 hours of instructional time where she needs to be productively occupied. Right now I have: Math U See - 45 minutes Barton Reading Practice - 30 minutes Independent Reading (History/Literature) - 30 minutes Handwriting - 15 minutes So that's 2 hours. I need an additional 2 hours of independent but good, solid practice she can do. I might have her set a timer and do breaks every 50 minutes to get water, go to bathroom, take a walk, but again, I still have a lot of time I want to be filled with productive stuff. What ideas do you have for independent work for a special needs 14 year old working at a 2nd-4th grade level? (ideally no electronics because they're disallowed at the school AND she can't do audiobooks well because she's HOH)

Posted too early, sorry! - assistant daycare worker (again experience mighf trump education herr) - housecleaning - pet sitting - factory? (I know many of these jobs are obsolete but surely there are some assembly-line style jobs left) - start own business w/help (sew, crochet, paint and sell on etsy or some such thing)

We're in a similar boat with DD14. Some possibilities: - work at a farm (nobody asks/cares about diplomas, they just want to know if you are a hard worker and good with animals)

The milk reviews!!! Haha! Thanks for bringing that up, those seriously made my night!

You could make one for him and print it and then take it to Staples or Fedex and they'd bind it for you with a simple spiral binding for like $3-5. Ooh, and if you made one you could even include things that would specifically help him, like including an alphabet handwriting strip across the top of each page if dysgraphia is a real issue for him. I've been considering making one for my daughter to help her grasp the concepts of time and to help her be more independent with her schoolwork and schedule. Something with bold lines and a simple but fun-looking layout that helps manage a teen-ish schedule but with a younger mindset (my daughter has intellectual disability). Anyway, it really can be simple on Pages or Publisher and then you just make up 1-2 mock-up pages and then copy it enough times for all the weeks of school. I like your idea of having one that has one page per day. It could be helpful to mentally focus on the day's assignments too. Unfortunately the only pre-made ones like that I know of are super pricey and made for grown women, like the Day Designer. A student one with 180 days could be much simpler than those.

Oh I completely forgot to add it to my post earlier but I highly recommend reading Cheryl Swope's Simply Classical book. Truly inspiring even if you don't do Classical and if you do then it will give you all kinds of renewed hope and practical ideas. Also, she's an active poster on the Memoria Press forums and so if you post there under there struggling learners forum you can speak directly to her. Super useful if you read the book and have questions or just want tips about a particular subject.

It could be either a hearing issue or a processing issue or just a phonological awareness issue. My 5 year old is like this. He mishears stuff all the time and his speech lags just a bit and he shows a lot of signs of dyslexia. We're working through LiPS and I hope that and just time and attention helps his speech catch up. I've seen big strides even in the past year between 5 and 6. And on the other hand, like Paige, one of our kids does have a legit significant hearing loss and her 'symptoms' at 5-6 were pretty mild. She wasn't diagnosed until almost 8 years old. Neither her teachers nor birth family realized fully until her second time through 1st grade and then she failed a routine screening and was sent for further testing.