...and it hasn't been half bad!
Today I started my "No excuse for abuse" campaign with M. I don't know if I told you all, but a few months ago I ordered The Total Transformation, and that is one of, if not the, main ideas of the program. We talked about what abuse looks like and what it doesn't look like. He wasn't very interested, and at one point got up and half-erased the white board. But after that he started talking a bit more about it.
We've decided so far that abuse is yelling at each other, not being attentive to the other, and walking out of the room without asking or saying where you are going (being rude). What is not abusive is speaking nicely, using nice body language, acknowledging when another person has talked to you, asking to do things.
It's a work in progress.
We also put up the numbers for our timeline. He wrote the numbers on a piece of paper and I hung the pages up around the room. Every time we study something in history, we will make an index card up with details of that something and hang the card under the year. I thought this would be a good way to be more visual with him.
Over the break, I read some of The Out of Sync Child Has Fun again because I wanted to find ways that would work with our school for him to get some of the sensory input that he needs. So today was our day for making paint, glue/glitter bags. Basically, you take a ziploc bag, throw some glue and glitter or paint in it, zip it up and let the kid "paint" with it, squeeze it or whatever he can think to do with it. It's called "no mess painting" and can also be used with kids who don't like to get messy. M is NOT one of those kids. He loves to put glue on his hands, let it dry and pick it off (I like to too, if we are being honest).
For Math today, M had decided to do some worksheets in a workbook. But I cleaned out the hall closet while he was taking a break and found our tangrams. So instead of worksheets, he did hands on geometry. Today was easy stuff...using the pieces to duplicate shapes on the cards that came with the set. Tomorrow it will be something more difficult, like making a house of his own design.
Yesterday we went to Stone's Education Superstore and used our $60 worth of Groupon certificates. That was fun! I got a couple lesson books, a hangy-uppy thing for more visuals for him, glue, paint, glitter and a couple of teachers guides for books. I'm rather excited about those. In fact, right now I'm waiting for a shipment from gohastings.com of a book I ordered called from the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I had gotten a teachers guide a while ago at The Homeschool Gathering Place for that book, and now I can't wait to use it.
Tomorrow I think we will start our Citizenship lesson (which will be about 4 weeks long), teach him how to clean a bathroom (he's become a whiz at doing laundry), do some daily 6 trait writing, and then Math of some sort. I'm pretty lenient on the math right now...we're still doing review work, then we'll start something new probably at the end of this week or beginning of next.
So we didn't do a huge amount of what most would call "school work," but we did enough that I am satisfied. I really need to get out of the mindset of thinking that only written work is school work. As long as he's learning, he's in school. Just because it isn't "school" like most think of school doesn't mean he's not learning. After all, isn't that the reason I decided to homeschool him? To get away from that whole "school" mentality? Conundrum. :)
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