Assessment 2024--Brother

 

This face!

This beautiful, smiling face!

This kid has had a seriously hard life.  

He had a seriously hard 9-10 months or so this past school year.

But now . . .

But now he is stable and  . . . look at that face!

He's happy.

He's stable.

He's thriving.

Grateful, blessed, awed, amazed, thrilled . . . all of the adjectives aren't enough to describe what I feel over seeing Brother happy, stable, and thriving.

A significant portion of our year was spent tweaking his med regimen to help him get to happy, stable and thriving.  How grateful I am for his psychiatrist, our case manager, and our FSP for helping us get to this point.

He loves math.

He whipped through Math 4, 5, and 6 this year.  He'd be working on Math 7 right now, but I'm still saving up our homeschool budget so that I can purchase the various maths the kids need from Teaching Textbooks.  I plan to purchase both Math 7 and Math 8 for him for the upcoming school year.

He hates drawing/art.

Hates it passionately.

Unless it is technical drawing--using stencils and rulers and careful measurements and such.

He'll tape dozens of pages together and draw detailed freeway maps, complete with on/off ramps, frontage roads, merge lanes, and traffic directions.

But ask him to paint an outline of a bird or draw a shark with a guided video and he'll break down completely.

So I stopped asking him to do those things, and I'm letting him write instead.

His handwriting, spelling, and punctuation look a lot like late second grade.  But his composition and style are quite good.

He needs to finish what he starts when he starts it.  Asking him to stop in the middle of something to complete it later is tantamount to a serious crisis.  

I think this is part of his autism.

Therefore I'm not asking him to change.

I work pretty hard to arrange our schedule such that anything we need to do together is done before I dismiss kids to work independently on writing or creating.

I've learned to do this the hard way.

As with all of my younger 6 kids, the majority of our learning has come through family read-alouds. We've covered history, literature, science, social-emotional skills, and so much more.  Brother has participated in all of the reading with us, and he has responded with thoughtful comments that let me know he is successfully learning through it all.

Other family learning experiences this year have included American Rhythm, Morning Meeting, cooking lessons, and church activities.  Brother is an active, capable participant in all of them, and he particularly loves cooking and American Rhythm.

Brother has been growing very hard.  He's always hungry, and I am always offering him large quantities of food.  

He loves hard work.

He's happiest when he's pushing a lawn mower, hauling heavy things, building something with real tools, or training his body through push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, sprinting, or some other form of exercise.

He loves helping people.

He likes to be right.

Of the social-emotional skills we're working on, learning to be wrong and learning to let other people be wrong are at the top of the list.

His heart is so good.

He shared just last Sunday at church, "I set a goal to be kinder to my siblings.  And when I was kinder, it was easier to be wrong.  It was easier to accept correction.  It was easier to listen to my mom and dad."

This kid is one of my greatest miracles!