Lychee Update

We talk so much about her big brother on here and Lychee tends to largely get ignored. This is for the most part because I feel like a lot of the posts would be very repetitive if I told you what we did with One child and then repeated it when the next one came along!

However, with regards to reading the children have learnt VERY differently. We tried the flashcard and YBCR system that worked so well with Cosmo, but had very little results with Lychee. She just wasn't interested. However she loves Starfall.com and we noticed that unlike her brother, who learnt using the whole word system, she was able to name individual letters by their sound. 

With this in mind we started using the hooked on phonics videos with her a little while back. Today she started sounding out words that she had never seen before by herself for the first time. She still pronounces each letter separately ('T-H-I-S' instead of 'Th-Is) and annunciates VERY clearly (it takes a long time to read when you pronounce each letter as a syllable) but it is a great leap forward developmentally and a step in the right direction decoding sounds ready for reading. 

I'm absolutely thrilled. If you want to see the video she was working on, it's here. 

Termly report

Part of belonging to the PLACE scheme that we are a part of involves writing up a termly 'monitoring' form. It's one of the complaints I've heard from other home educators about the scheme. They don't want anyone else to keep a record of their child's progress.

I don't actually mind doing it, in fact, today was the first one I've written and I rather enjoyed it. It was amazing looking back over the last term and seeing how far we've come.

This was the term we started the GAPS diet to see if it would improve Cosmo's ASD, and the results have been astounding. When I think back to the differences between Christmas and now I'm filled with joy about how far we've come.

Termly reports are going to be a great way for me to sit down and review; on days when I feel like we haven't done anything, I realise we really have. It may not feel like we've done a lot today, or even this week, but when I look back over a term, it really is a shock to see just what we've managed to cover.

Even if you aren't part of a scheme like PLACE, if you home educate, I'd recommend writing a termly report. Not only does it provide a record for future admissions etc... If your child chooses to go on to college etc... But it's good for your soul to see just how much you really have achieved. A state education just cannot come close.

Does this count as home ed?

Today my daughter learned how to go forwards on a push along car. Previous experimentation had only resulted in backward motion.

Does this count as home ed?

The value of old school...

Sometimes I love showing my kids stuff that I enjoyed when I was little. In part, sometimes this is because the content just seems more appropriate than what's on tv for them today.

I'll take 'Hoppity Goes To Town' Over 'Waybalou' any day.

Then there's the whole Charlotte Mason crew, who'll tell you that books and show designed for children today are dumbed down to much and don't excite our children's interest. I was amazed to see how fascinated Cosmo was with the 'How My Body Works' 80's series vs something like 'Nina and the Neurones'.

Not that there's anything wrong with Nina, but he get's bored and leaves the room, whereas he asks me to keep rewinding bits of 'How My Body Works' because he wants to see the blood clotting again...etc...

But the most valuable thing I've noticed for my son is the fact that old school cartoons are in 2D, and the graphics aren't very good.

Does that sound like a bad thing?

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD, the paediatrician told me that he had trouble separating truth and fiction. That he thought everything he read was true, and everything he saw on tv was really happening.

This was certainly true with the pixar movies he loved. We watched 'Cars' over and over again and he would shout at lightning McQueen 'you have to change your tyres or they'll go bang' and I'd say 'sweetheart, he can't hear you, it's just a movie'.

The tyres would go bang and he say 'aw man! Not again!'

No amount of explaining could convince him that the TV wasn't Skype. That these things weren't actually happening somewhere in the world.

Until we watched 'Muppet Babies'.

I wanted to show him an episode I'd watched when I was a kid about good things happening in the dark (we were going through a stage of wanting the lights on all night). I'm not sure quite when it happened, but he seemed to understand that it wasn't real. I introduced some more nostalgic cartoons, like 'wacky races' and the next thing I know he is telling me that 'despicable me' (another Pixar favourite) isn't really real. It's just pretend.

This is such a relief. Even bedtime stories, we were having to be so careful with the content, and explain over and over that it hadn't really happened. Now we are free to explore a world of fiction, without traumatising him everytime there is a negative storyline.

This post is linked up at no ordinary blog hop

Centre of the cell

Its taken me ages to get around to writing this, but in half term we went to a vicious venoms and poisonous parasites workshop at centre of the cell in London.

The day began with a train journey into London, or should I say Luton, where I got kicked off the train for having a cheap ticket. Turns out I'm not allowed to ride on virgin trains if I have an FCC ticket, much to my sisters amusement.

Anyway, we made it to centre of the cell, which was fantastic. They really do cater to all ages, with questions simple enough for a four year old to understand and knowledge deep enough to hit GCSE requirements and more.

The first section was called a 'pod show' and you get inside a pod which is shaped like an 8 day old embryo.

There are huge screens on the ceiling where they show videos at various points through the show. In the centre of the pod is a 'nucleus' which contains tons of touch screen interactive games. They're done simply enough that Will was easily able to identify a gene for deafness, raise a colony of bacteria, treat severe burns and even watch a simulation of himself from birth to now.

I was worried that the lights and sound might be too much for him, but they whole place (including lighting) has been specially designed to be an optimum learning environment and epilepsy safe. It was incredible to see Will's ability to concentrate and focus improve so dramatically being in a low stimulation environment. It's definitely made me more sympathetic to him wanting the curtains closed during the day when he is doing copywork. The light is just too bright for him to focus.

We then moved on to a lecture room where we got to see an experiment of what happens to blood when venom is added, and learn a bit about different venomous animals. Did you know that a jellyfish has 24 eyes? Me neither, but I do now!

We were also amazed to find out that slow loris's are one of the most deadly animals. They lick their elbows (where they secrete poisons) just before they bite you, which makes their saliva deadly toxic. Poison arrow frogs on the other hand are not actually poisonous at all. They eat poisonous insects, then excrete the poisons through their skin, so they are only ever as dangerous as the prey they have recently found.

There were some craft activities and interactive learning packs for older children, but the toddlers were happy just pottering about looking at everything and making bracelets out of 'DNA' beads.

Then as we headed home we stopped in a bakery at St Pancras and bought some really extravagant cupcakes.

We brought them home and had just enough time for a tea party with all the teddies before bed.

A fantastic day out which I hope to repeat again soon.

To see all of our photos, check out our 'travels' blog.

Readeez

We love Readeez in our house. If you don't know what a Readeez is, you should check out this video.

I mean, seriously how cute, yet stealthily educational, is that?

Cosmo's personal favourite is 'Geometreez' where the little girl, 'Isobel' performs various acrobatics to demonstrate rotating on various axes.

There's readeez to help with general phonics recognition and frequent sight words for smaller children with reading and english grammar for slightly older kids. The videos use music and 'syllable sync' (where the words pop up syllable by syllable as they are spoken and sung) to help children learn.

I love this. How much easier was it to learn the alphabet, months of the year or even the periodic table when you had a song that went with it?

And then there's just some really cute videos that my children love like the lullaby 'Tonight and every night'.

The great thing about Readeez is that they don't dumb it down too much. There are long words, used in context, that my children learn to recognize and use without being concerned by them.

If you want to just watch a few readeez there are a tonne on youtube, but I recommend downloading them for a couple of reasons.

i) somebody works really hard to produce this excellent and innovative resource and I like to support that. I respect that they give so much content away for free and think it's nice to give back

ii) they are excellent value, especially if you by the bundle. Three half hour movies and a CD of songs is excellent for what ends up costing about £15.

Free Copy Work Practice

Cosmo is about ready for copy work now, so we started out yesterday. The first line took nearly thirty minutes (he's quite the perfectionist) but as he got into the swing of things, he managed to complete the next three lines in seven minutes.

He's so proud of himself for being able to write a full sentence.

If you want to start copy work, you don't need to spend a lot of money on handwriting practice books. We are using a website called Handwriting Worksheets Maker (which is free) where you can choose the style of worksheet (Print, D'Nealian or Cursive), dots, dashes, hollow letter styles and whether you want them to trace the letters or just have the starting dots.

You then type in your words or sentences that you'd like, we're using his memory verses so that it's familiar, and it's done. Super easy, totally customisable and free; what more could you want?

For best results, remember to set your printer to landscape mode.