S/O WTM Rigor and Special Needs

[Murmer]

So I have been thinking about this even before that other thread was started today. *I* love the WTM method because I feel it is very rigorous which is not what is happening in the PS that I have worked in. But with my dd being diagnosed with ADHD at such a young age I am starting to worry that the rigor will be too much for her. Especially since she is very much a touch and do not read and listen child. So it makes me wonder how do you make WTM work for your special children? What is the most important part of WTM? What do you feel can be left out?

 

How do you combine WTM when working with your special child and your neurotypical child?

 

TIA

[rafiki]

.

[Paintedlady]

I do use WTM and as rigorous course of study as she can handle. Most of the time that means challenging her to new levels of competency, but also slowing down when needed so as not to overwhelm her. It's a balancing act that routinely has me second guessing myself and :banghead:.

[SweetMissMagnolia]

kind of have been wondering same thing here........

[5knights3maidens]

I'm going to try and do a lot of hands-on things around here with dd (soon to be 8) . Experiments, crafts, etc. This way dd can stand up and move around. ;) I still am worrying that by the end of the day we might be exhausted; or should I say everyone except dd. ;)

[NittanyJen]

One thing SWB emphasizes over and over in her book is the need to customize your program to fit your child's needs, which is perfect for this population.

 

If you have a child who needs longer to develop his physical or neurological writing skills, but can dictate, great! Use the narration technique so that he can move ahead academically while you continue to work on those skills separately.

 

There is no one size fits all element to WTM if you read it carefully.

 

The challenging aspect of it is exactly what many of our kids need-- XXY, Asperger's and ADHD are all dx's that do not preclude high IQ's or academic ability if we remove the child's roadblocks to success. It is important to still provide the needed remediation, as for most of us the goal is independence, and where possible freedom from those roadblocks rather than dependence on accommodations, but we are in a great position to provide that remediation and separately not mistake it for lack of ability on the part of our children.

 

All kiddos are different, and they all have different capabilities of course. Just set your goals appropriately for your child, and you can WTM your way there by then choosing the appropriate resources-- if your child is in the very rare group clinically diagnosed with dyscalcula, it's okay to take more than one year to complete a level of math-- you aren't letting the WTM method or your child down!

 

The great thing about this method is that it is so flexible! I have one XXY kiddo and one neurotypical kiddo, and both are thriving under WTM plans-- just not always the same ones.

 

Jen

http://hillandalefarmschool.blogspot.com/

 

 

http

[Renee in NC]

It's a constant balancing act. How do you push forward in content while remediating skills and accomodating issues?

 

I think that I am getting better at it, but the biggest roadblock I have now is time. There is only so much *time* in my day and there are 5 students and a preschooler! I am working on getting audio books through Learning Ally and BookShare. I am looking at speech-to-text software (though my 10yo's typing ability is getting much better.)

 

I also accomodate/modify topics to compensate as well. My 10yo wants badly to learn Latin (and he has started to), but practicing Latin phonetics and pronunciation confuses him. So, for now, he is skipping that part. He can write the words through the whole word method and he can orally drill and review. That is good enough for now.

 

I want my children to get as far as they can. That may mean completing the rhetoric level as outlined in TWTM or it may be a modified logic stage level - it just depends on the student. Some students may never get beyond the grammar stage, but that is okay, too.

 

The most important thing is that they achieve as much as their abilities and issues allow them. In ps, they wanted to put my ds in a self-contained room. I was looking for accomodations in a regular room. Neither was a good option, so we are homeschooling again. This way the educational choices fit him instead of trying to make him fit them.;)

[laundrycrisis]

It's a constant balancing act. How do you push forward in content while remediating skills and accomodating issues?

 

 

This is the part I struggle with. I would like to tackle all that is recommended in the WTM. I would like to go much further with history, geography, and science than we have. But I feel compelled to spend most of our school time and our son's focus (there is only so much available each day) on the 3Rs which are still so hard for him, because I am so worried about those.

[NittanyJen]

An excellent question... Balancing moving forward on content vs mastering the 3 R's if those are your child's struggle, or doing other remediation, without letting school take over his or her whole life!

 

With my 7YO, we added read-alouds as part of the history program, but started with a max of 1 chapter per day, and had child led book discussion after the reading. So while studying ancient Greece and Rome, we read through Padric Colum's Children's Homer, and Lively's version of the Aeneid. This piqued his interest in reading enough that I was able to assign him on-topic selections from Magic Treehouse and Time Warp Trio-- maybe not the heaviest hitters, but at least on topic and suddenly he was reading on his own! Willingly! The more he read, the better he got. He still isn't quite grade level, but improved enough that his comprehension and retention are better. Voila-- reading and history at once!

 

Writing and history is trickier. His difficulty with writing is also neurological in origin, and I don't wa t the process to get in the way of his learning. So we do WWE level 1 style narrations of what we learned in History Odyssey, where I write down his thoughts, and prompt him for complete sentences and main ideas. I have him copy one of his own sentences when we are done. Bingo-- history and writing together reinforced.

 

In math (Singapore) it takes him a lot of concentration to not reverse numbers front to back and in place value, even though he knows the difference, and takes him a long time to form them. We compromise. We do the text orally, and the workbooks he has to write, and fix his errors. This way he knows I know what he can do and does not get discouraged. We have seen tremendous improvement.

 

It is hard to know how much to ask, when to ask it, and is frankly exhausting to figure it out all the time-- when do I need to separate out these components, and when do I knit them back together? I think that's where following back up with a good Ed psych periodically is helpful. And in the end we just have to trust ourselves! Even just in the XXY community (which, like autism, is a spectrum condition thanks to the way the x chromosome works) each kid is an individual and won't respond to someone else's prescribed path. Would that it were so simple!

 

Jen

[Murmer]

Thanks so much and I hope more people will answer...My daughter is still really young but I am already getting a lot of pressure from the school district special education to put her in public school but I don't want to...I feel like the public school will just push her off to the side because she takes so much work behaviorally that she won't get the kind of education I want for her. I want her to have the rigorous WTM education but also want her to feel successful so hopefully I can figure out the balance.

[Critterfixer]

I guess I see a WTM education as less of an education and more of a way of thinking about learning as a whole: sort of an education as a way to teaching a person how to learn.

A case in point might be how I use narration as a tool to teach reading comprehension instead of a measurement of how much the boys have retained. My ds7hFA is not the sort of child who can listen and just "get it". His mind wanders, I think, and he has trouble with chronology of events, and the persons in the tale really don't mean anything to him. Rather than drop narration I use it to teach him how to look for those things.

He's slow to read, and probably won't be reading independently for some time yet, but I am concentrating on going as slowly as he needs to get it right so that I don't send him into new material half-clothed as it were. I think that is in line with the idea of WTM, taking the necessary time to build a strong foundation.

And it really isn't that different for his brother. Just different skills, a different level and so forth. I'm just concentrated on getting them on solid footing wherever they may be in the academic scheme of things.

 

Of course, given the uh, intensity on the rigor threads, this may just be my way of avoiding rigor mortis.

Edited June 28, 2011 by Critterfixer

[PeterPan]

You wanted more replies, so here goes...

 

Did the ps do your evaluations, or are you getting therapy through them? You might want to check your legal obligations in your state and not give yourself more hassles than you need. There can be good intentions, but frankly the schools get $$$ when our kids come. SN kids are more of a drain, but they still bring in $$. Around here the schools, at one point, had these strange promo calls they were doing, fishing, asking what services they could offer to lure us back, etc.

 

Next, in your shoes, and this is just me, I would do a little bit of reading ahead on any areas you THINK they are going to struggle with academically and start laying some informal, happy seeds there. For instance my ds with verbal apraxia has, if you believe the statistics, a 75% chance of turning out to have some degree of dyslexia. Given that my dd is (not a formal diagnosis but pretty stinkin' obvious), that wouldn't be a shock. So I have started, even at this tender age of not quite three, doing some light weaving in, just as we go through the day, of things I know he'll need. I know he needs phonemic awareness. He needs to be able to HEAR the difference between /a/, /e/, and /i/. He needs to be able to hear those sounds and replicate them, attach them to written, etc. It's the kind of stuff we'll do more fully when he's 5 and trying to learn to read, but it's the kind of stuff we can do now. With math, we'll probably start in the fall some basic number awareness stuff (recognizing quantities, math with objects, visualizing quantities, etc.). I guess I can do that, because it's the stuff I did with dd when she was 5 and 6. But now I'm looking at it differently. I'm looking at it thinking: If this dc is going to have a long, hard slog (which I can't tell, but which he might), I'm just going to start so gently laying a foundation, putting in those little background bits to make it easier later.

 

Or you know, you might go a totally different direction. We don't have ADHD in our house, however we do have sensory issues and what one person has said is probably ADD. There's a lot you can do foundationally there, getting OT, working on the sensory stuff, reading and implementing the ideas in "The Out of Sync Child Has Fun." These are all things that set you up for a GOOD homeschool experience later. The hard part of homeschooling is that you aren't ONLY teaching. You're teaching and wiping noses and keeping house and researching to learning about all these issues and driving to therapy and keeping down your weight after you ate too much chocolate to deal with the stress and...

 

So when you pick the areas you *can* work on now and start nibbling on them, you're setting yourself up for success. It's like when people say the best preparation you can make for homeschooling is to get your house in order. It's true. Do NOW the things you can start to do now, and that will make it easier to do the things later that will assuredly pile on.

 

As far as rigor, well that whole discussion on the hs board has been just a hornet's nest, eh? Did you catch Regena's definition? Challenge plus discipline. How's that for helpful. You're going to learn, as your dc grows, how much challenge you can give them. Frankly, for sn kids, I think the discipline and structure side is harder. I can make harder academics happen. I can't miraculously raise her stim level or fix an out of sync day or change the fatigue of low tone to make the academics be able to happen. So the more you work on the structure and routine now, just basic predictability and habits (hard to make happen, I know!), the more you're setting yourself up for a positive outcome later.

 

Some kids are more anti- or neurologically without structure, mercy. I'm sort of de-structured myself, and dd is beyond belief. There's actually a whole category for you to read about there called "executive dysfunction." There's a spot in the brain that controls it. So probably you're seeing signs of that already. At least you have the diagnosis, a great head start! Now you take that ADHD diagnosis and you start watching to see what areas are affected and how you can help them if possible. These kids can have working memory issues, executive function issues, etc.

 

Well did that make any sense? Honestly, I think your biggest problems are not going to turn out to be how to add rigor. I'm sure you're going to figure that out. They're going to be that it's just plain hard work to help these kids grow and mature into all they can be.

 

Ok, after all that I'm rereading and trying to figure out if I answered any of your questions, lol. Read WTM and take it under advisement. However, honestly, once you know you have learning differences, I think you're wise to do the testing, work on areas where you see weaknesses (auditory processing, phonemic awareness, dyslexia, etc. etc.) and only use WTM ideas where they fit in. Take some of the concepts of WTM (audio books when they're little, a language rich environment, diverse read alouds, broad exposure, levels of written expression, types of output) and then make fit your dc, where they can. But it's not going to be a glove, that's for sure. In our house there has been a constant struggle between WTM's read/write approach and my dd's HEAVY, heavy need to DO. Every kid has their thing, but especially these SN kids do. You want to watch for that, harness it, and not be afraid of it.

Edited June 28, 2011 by OhElizabeth

[cathmom]

In our house there has been a constant struggle between WTM's read/write approach

 

this is the real difficulty for me right now with my high schooler - she has really bad dysgraphia (also dyslexia). I am rereading WTM and just read in the history rec's for the logic stage that they should be writing 2-4 page summaries for the history notebook every week!!!!!!! If we did nothing else, and I had no other students, I don't think she could do that.

[PeterPan]

I reread your original post. You said she's a doer. Then start doing!! Seriously, go crazy with doing. Don't buy curriculum. Just buy activity books and DO things. And to get in the read-alouds, let her DO something while you read. Or put on an audiobook while she does things. Even if she's just running around in the yard while you read aloud fairy tales, she's absorbing that language.

 

If your dd is a do-er, just DO things. The ACS has marvelous books of science activities that she'll be ready for, maybe now, definitely in a year. Hit the children's non-fiction section of your library adn check out books. They'll usually have explanations with pictures and then an activity. Just do stuff! I'm just telling you my hindsite as one who has btdt. :)

 

When my dd was that age we did the Big Art for Little Hands book, Alphabet Art, and others in that series. We would take nature walks with guides, trying to identify things (wildflowers, trees, birds, etc.). We did Kindermusik. I don't think you have to leave out or avoid anything in WTM, honestly. I think you just change HOW you do it. You don't just read about worms, you buy the worms and compost with them in a tote. You don't just read about the art in the Katie books, you break out the paints and imitate them. Or print the pictures (pull from online and print at walgreens, uber-cheap) and do picture study or play matching. Or you get the Vox music masters cd's to listen to while you play and picnic to the music.

 

So no, I wouldn't feel compelled to skip anything, not at this age. You want to give them a variety of experiences. You're going to focus on the basics, that's for sure. But still create variety through your read alouds and what you do.

[PeterPan]

this is the real difficulty for me right now with my high schooler - she has really bad dysgraphia (also dyslexia). I am rereading WTM and just read in the history rec's for the logic stage that they should be writing 2-4 page summaries for the history notebook every week!!!!!!! If we did nothing else, and I had no other students, I don't think she could do that.

 

Yeah, and say you take their FAVORITE SUBJECT and whomp them with a task using their hardest, most wearying skill. How far are we going to get with that? So no, in our house that writing has to go to something else. And it gets typed. And there's a lot of leading up to the writing, making sure it's in her head. And the quantities have to be made sane.

 

It's all nice to have these orderly, sequential amounts you want to hold to, but you can only get out of them what you can get out of them. It's blood from a turnip. I know it's one of the things we want to work on this coming year. But let's be honest with the op. This year we spent a LOT of time doing therapy stuff. It was just the year of therapy. Our output didn't look impressive. But we HAD to do that. And once you get in this realm of kids who are different, you're going to have years and stages and needs like that. I like the WTM because I like knowing where things are going and how skills progress. I tend to be very b&w, either all the way there or not at all. The WTM let's me see how we can get there more incrementally. Then I can see what's doable and what has to modify.

 

Actually, what I've been doing (and plan to do more of) is going back to stages we modified the first time through and REPEATING them.

 

But whatever. To the extent the op hits walls, she's going to learn for herself. Every kid is different. There are actually sn kids who are fine with a pen in their hand. You just don't know what you have till you start working with them. That's why I said to start working now, weaving in little, pleasant bits, so you can start to notice where the problems are going to be and start any therapies or techniques to help them.

[Critterfixer]

this is the real difficulty for me right now with my high schooler - she has really bad dysgraphia (also dyslexia). I am rereading WTM and just read in the history rec's for the logic stage that they should be writing 2-4 page summaries for the history notebook every week!!!!!!! If we did nothing else, and I had no other students, I don't think she could do that.

 

I'd look at this in several ways. Let's just say that you had a child who had a physical problem with writing, an injury or deformity that left them unable to write at the logic stage. Would you expect that child to write the 2-4 page summary for the history notebook? Never! You would require the information via another conduit.

 

A child that can't write by hand the 2-4 page summary might be able to type it. He might be able to outline it, and then flesh it out for you orally. There might even be software out there to let a child narrate the thing right to the computer. They could do it on a tape recorder and play it back a sentence at a time to write or type it. (Substitute your favorite device here, I'm showing my age and technophobia here.:tongue_smilie:)

 

And lets say that the child can't write two to three pages in a week. Could they do one page a week? One well written paragraph, concise and to the point per day? One thing I have found out is that a large task, broken down into manageable bits per day has a greater chance of getting done than a mammoth project presented with a deadline. I'd sooner have one paragraph on paper and a head full of understanding, than four pages churned out so that I can have a record of it. It's all to easy to get caught up in that trap.

Do they still need to know how to write a paper for future studies in college and beyond? Yes. To that end you have to show them ways to make it work for them. Dysgraphia would make it really hard to take notes in class. Dyslexia would make it very difficult to read the book. So, this student would need to figure out a way to listen very carefully and to organize the information in his or her mind. It might help to listen and listen to the lecture via a recording. It might help to watch recordings of the same information. I think part of our job as teachers is to give students the tools that they need for their own learning, and the knowledge of which tools are going to be their go-to implement when they have to tackle new information.

[YLVD]

It's a constant balancing act. How do you push forward in content while remediating skills and accomodating issues?

 

I think that I am getting better at it, but the biggest roadblock I have now is time. There is only so much *time* in my day and there are 5 students and a preschooler! I am working on getting audio books through Learning Ally and BookShare. I am looking at speech-to-text software (though my 10yo's typing ability is getting much better.)

 

I also accomodate/modify topics to compensate as well. My 10yo wants badly to learn Latin (and he has started to), but practicing Latin phonetics and pronunciation confuses him. So, for now, he is skipping that part. He can write the words through the whole word method and he can orally drill and review. That is good enough for now.

 

I want my children to get as far as they can. That may mean completing the rhetoric level as outlined in TWTM or it may be a modified logic stage level - it just depends on the student. Some students may never get beyond the grammar stage, but that is okay, too.

 

The most important thing is that they achieve as much as their abilities and issues allow them. In ps, they wanted to put my ds in a self-contained room. I was looking for accomodations in a regular room. Neither was a good option, so we are homeschooling again. This way the educational choices fit him instead of trying to make him fit them.;)

 

:iagree:

 

This is the approach that I am trying to take.