A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

Brother had a great year.  With his med regimen working, he's free to be his best self, and he really is one of the best human beings on the planet! He's kind, generous, hard-working, and forgiving.   He loves learning.   Math He completed  Teaching Textbooks Math 7 and started Pre-Algebra .  He hates asking for help, and now that math is getting more abstract, he's frustrated pretty regularly, but he's learning to close the computer and take a break before coming back to try again.   I'm proud of him for using positive coping skills. That said, anything less than a perfect score leaves him unsettled, so we're still working on learning that a good job isn't always a perfect job. Morning Meeting Mister Man was an active participant in all of our Morning Meetings.  He read, sang, answered questions, learned to lead music in 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4 time, memorized scriptures, and contributed spiritual insights to our daily lessons. Brother is a singe...

  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. Hate...

 I have tried innumerable ways to write the kids' assessments individually, but this year does not lend itself to individual recording.  It was a kind of sabbatical year. We rested from our usual labors, and we employed ourselves in an array of activities that all blended together into general growth. Morning Meeting This continued as usual because it is one of the anchors of our days--keeps us from flying away into chaos.   Half of this school year included the end of our Come, Follow Me Old Testament studies.  We also read the Old Testament portion of Egermeier's Bible Story Book as well as our usual rereading of The Jesus Storybook Bible in December.  As part of our studies, we sang a hymn or primary song every week at every Morning Meeting.  We memorized the primary scripture of the month And I chose a scripture each week to go with the  Come, Follow Me  lesson that we recited 3 times during each meeting.  We didn't really memoriz...

  When our school year began, Brother's behaviors were in a hard and fast decline.  He was having multiple breakdowns per day, several of which were so dangerous that he was approved by the state for residential care in a behavioral facility.  Though I had a delightful academic plan for him, that plan had to take a back seat to mental and physical survival. In the long run, even though we found a bed for him at a terrific facility, it was denied him by a stranger in the higher echelons of the state foster/adopt system.  Just as we were in our deepest despair, we were able to see a psychiatrist who prescribed the medication cocktail that is still working today for our boy.   God came through in the 11th hour--not as we expected, but as we needed! We lived (and in many ways, are still living) on tenterhooks, but as we settled down to a degree of safety previously unknown, I introduced a couple of school subjects for Brother to work on--math and spelling....

  Brother has the spirit of an angel . . . and the face of one, too.     He started this school year in his best place.  He was emotionally stable, learning at a rapid pace, meeting therapy goals every week, and happy every day.  However, small boys grow quickly, med adjustments need to be made, and Brother is no longer in his best place.  His sweet spirit is now often hidden by rages, and we're really struggling to find the balance we once had. Here's the academic goal list we started with: Academy Phonics Grade 2 , Rod and Staff Reading Grade 2 , Rod and Staff (includes Bible readings) Language Arts Grade 2 , Rod and Staff Explode the Code 3 and 3 1/2 Arithmetic 2 (finish) Arithmetic 3 (start), Rod and Staff   He worked so well at the beginning of the year.  We scheduled his RBT time during his independent school hours, and with so much support, he raced through both Explode the Code books, finished up Arithmetic 2 ,  got a great s...

How grateful we all are that Brother's school year, that came in like a lion, went out like a lamb! In the beginning, we were holding on with our fingernails to what routine we could.  We ended each day sweaty, worn, and bleeding in heart, body, or both. I spent many hours researching and considering schools for Brother to give the rest of us a rest and spread out the responsibility of care, but in the end, we chose none of them, and for now, we need none of them. Part of the solution was surely, surely getting Brother off meds that hurt his brain. I believe that another part was Brother's baptism and confirmation in January. Without going into a long list of pros and cons and considerations, we felt in our hearts that it was better to go ahead with this saving ordinance than it was to wait.  My eyes have seen and my heart has felt that this was the correct choice for Brother's well-being. I trust that he is better for both physical and spiritual reasons. An...

4:04 pm I'm sitting on the floor of Brother's room as he cries. I thought I could prevent a disaster by calling him outside near me. I was wrong. Disaster came anyway. And now I'm waiting near him. I wonder about this waiting. It's all I can do right now. Wait. Wait. Wait. And hope. And pray. Being present. For when he is ready.

Mister Man spent months kitting this orange scarf that he proudly gave to Grampa Chad.  The good news is that Grampa Chad proudly wears it! Monday What a great day!  We had homeschool magic during Academy when our plan was to simply read a simple introductory book about the human body that inspired watching YouTube videos showing actual human systems and one video of a white blood cell chasing down a germ. The germ video was my favorite. The kids were alive with the wonder that only young kids can show when they wake to a bit of knowledge they'd not known before. During Symposium, the teens and read the first 55 pages of The Book Thief . Ummmmmm . . . this book is amazing! I don't know where it's going to go, but sometimes I lose my breath from the perfection of the prose, and I'm willing to take this ride. It's for our teen book club in mid-October. Water color painting by Little Princess--as assigned in The Good and the Beautiful Sir Walte...