Update and Good News!

It's been a few months and I am so in need of a update! Now that school is about to start in a couple weeks, I figured it was a good time to say what's new in our lives!

First of all, the grades I will be teaching this fall are 8th grade, 6th grade, 3rd grade, 1st grade and Pre-K. Can they really be this old??? A little about each of my kiddos:

My 8th grader amazes me! She was sick for about 6 months of last year's school year. There were times we thought she would be schooling well into summer. However, she worked hard when she felt good and it made up for the times she wasn't well. As an update on her health, after MRI's, EEG's and more blood tests than we care to remember, the doctors have NO answers. However, a couple months ago, the Lord really touched her body and she has not had any symptoms of seizures, vertigo or anything else that went along with our rough year of illness. God is so good!

My 6th grader is SO excited to be in Middle School! She is ready for school to start and excited for what the year brings. She is growing up fast and we are so proud of the young lady she is becoming!

My 3rd grader is excited for Math this year, can you believe it? We started using Teaching Textbooks last year and all my kids fell in love with it. However, my third grader was disappointed last year when she learned that you had to be in Third Grade to start using it! LOL Silly girl! On another note: I have suspected for the past year or so that my middle child had a slight dyslexia problem. In first grade, I figured she was just slower to read, her older sister was slower to read but then took off in Second Grade. But last year, it just got more frustrating for Sis and I started to notice some signs. I have been researching different things to do, but everything I found wanted you to invest in a program that cost several hundred dollars. This past weekend, I had the privilege to spend an afternoon with a woman who was a school teacher for 29 years and was TRULY interested in talking to me. I asked her what I could do for a child who was slightly dyslexic. She gave me a couple ideas that I implemented today and you would NOT believe the difference! So my friend told me that blue is a very relaxing color for their eyes. So she suggested taking a piece of card-stock and cutting a slit in it big enough to let just a sentence show at a time. So it blocks everything above and below that one line. Then cut a piece of blue see through plastic and tape it across the hole so that when they read that sentence it is in blue. I took it a step further and put another piece of card-stock on the other side so that the plastic wouldn't stick on things.For the blue plastic, I went to the party aisle at Walmart and bought a pack of those blue plastic party gift bags.I went a step further and bought blue paper for her to write on and that seemed to help as well. I only bought one package, so I need to go back and get more. It is more expensive than regular notepad paper by about $.50 Someone said that they went to Dollartree and got a pack of those clear multi-colored see through seperaters for binders. They had their kids try reading through the different colors, some liked it in blue, some in green and some in red but said that yellow and orange hurt their eyes. Kinda interesting! I picked up some of those and I am going to try those tomorrow. When my daughter sat down with her new bookmarks, I almost started crying! She took off reading and read seven short chapters of a book! She still struggled with some of the harder words, but the frustration was gone and she just wanted to read and read! I even did an test where she didn't use the bookmark. She about had a meltdown and couldn't keep her eyes where they needed to be. Her eyes hopped all over. As soon as we started using the bookmark again, she read several pages and had a big grin on her face as she read. Even giggling at the story! God is SO good!

My Second Grader is taking off with her schoolwork. We were noticing that she hesitated with her reading and realized that she was afraid to read better/faster than her older sister. After talking to her about how everyone learns differently and it was okay to go at her speed, she went with it and is reading like a pro!

My Pre-Kindergarten kiddo is actually going to a preschool this year three days a week. For those of you who don't know, my son has Dandy Walker Variant and has had some physical/emotional delays. So for the past 2 1/2 years, he has been in therapy for Sensory Processing Disorder as well as speech and PT. This year is his last year at preschool before we bring him home to homeschool! His teachers feel that at the end of this school year, he will be more than ready to come home and we agree. He has no learning disabilities, although he requires a lot of repetition. However, once he gets something, it's as if he has always known it. This fall, he will be going to the preschool three days a week, and on the other two days, he will be doing some work at home.

I think that is about all for my update! I have all our school work ordered and I am part way through getting lesson plans made out for the first couple months of school. We will be year round homeschooling again. This is our third year of it. Despite what some people said when we mentioned we were going to do this a couple years ago, we have NOT become burnt out. We enjoy having more frequent breaks throughout the year. It's been a blessing!

Praying blessing on your school year this fall!

Heidi