As many of you know, my second son Joseph graduates from our homeschool this year.  Is he spelling like I wanted him to?  No.  But I know that learning does not stop just because someone hands you a diploma.  Spelling well is going to be a personal challenge for him his whole life.  It’s a challenge that I cannot undertake for him, though I will continue to encourage him to find ways to maneuver around and work with his dyslexia, and in spite of his dyslexia!

As a benefit of being a consistent member of North Carolinians for Home Education (NCHE), we can order a diploma for a graduating child by filling out a form and sending 5 dollars for postage.  It’s still up to me to put the transcripts together, but I think it is so nice to have a professional looking diploma for my son’s records.   We were all very excited (just like we were for Daniel) when Joseph’s diploma arrived in the mail.  Michaela took one look at it and disappeared.  I did not think much about it until she reappeared with a homemade “cap” to go with Joseph’s diploma. 

It’s made from a column of cardstock, upon which sits a lovely square of cardboard, and (leaving no detail undone) there’s a fancy link of blue beads for Joseph’s graduation tassle.  What a graduation ceremony they had in the kitchen!  I told Joseph he certainly needed to keep that cap forever!  It is indeed one of a kind.

When you have a child with special needs, it’s easy to feel like you failed.  You can think of the “what ifs” until you make yourself crazy.  I did that for a couple of years, and while I still worry some, in the last year I have seen Joseph begin to find some things in life that he is very interested in.  I have watched over the last four years as he read nearly 100 large  (500+ pages) books for pleasure.  I know that he has what he needs on the inside to work hard and to find a way to make it, and that is more important than anything else.

It’s rainy here today and it’s a work day for me.  Michaela will do timed drill sheets for math.  I have some of my garden pictures printed out of the butterfly lifecycle and will have her arrange those and label them for her school notebook.  She is continuing to read in her Ambleside Year 5 books.  She will do a geography word find and some writing today.  When you work and homeschool, it’s good to have some easy ideas before you sit down at your desk!

I’m thankful for a cozy little office in which to work, my rain barrel that’s running over, the near-by birdfeeder that I can watch, family, faith, my tea kettle, and so many other little and big things.  Have a good Monday.

Lynn

I think most of you know my second son, Joseph, struggles tremendously with spelling.  He’s a very strong reader and tests very well on comprehension, but once he walks away from a book, he simply is a non-speller.  We are trying to get better, little by little, and time helps as he conquers more and more words — even little words that, being able to spell, maybe you and I take for granted.

John and Joseph playing cowboys — or GI Joe, or whatever they were playing at the moment.

Yesterday while reading from Of Courage Undaunted: Across the Continent with Lewis and Clark by James Daugherty, Michaela and I read a passage that our Joseph just had to hear. We called for him and read it again, aloud.

“Meriwether took his studies seriously, as he had coon hunting. In the next few years, under one teacher and another, he studied the hodgepodge of subjects that made up the education of a Virginia gentleman of that day. He studied history, Latin, geography, and mathematics, with a little botany and good manners thrown in. His spelling always remained personal and imaginative. He would spell some words three or four different ways, all of them wrong. ”

We all savored that passage, thinking of the courageous Meriwether Lewis, and marveling at how much it sounded like Joseph.

Lynn

Just for you, more pictures of the garden from Saturday.  It was a lovely weekend here, even if a bit chilly.  Tonight it’s supposed to be even colder. 

That’s okay.  It’s February.  (And you thought I didn’t know what month it was.)

Last night I did a bit of planning in the school planners.  We’ve got 17 weeks left in our school year.  We’ll be doing our annual testing in about 12 weeks.  A couple of those weeks will be a spring break for us. 

What does all of this mean?   This school year will be over before I know it!

Next year Princess of the Universe will start Beyond Five In A Row, which I am very excited about.  In this house, I don’t think we ever fully get away from Five In A Row, but formally she’ll be doing Beyond.  We have several more Five In A Row Volume 4 titles I want to “row” before this school year is over.  The one up next?

Angelo. 

It fits in perfectly right now, actually.  After reading about Ovid and looking at mythology, what better place to go than Rome?  We’ll have to pull out Papa Piccolo for review, of course, and try our hand at drawing cats and birds.  There is more reading I want to do from mythology and we’ll be reading more from Famous Men of Rome. 

As far as gardening this year, I really want to ExPaNd and have FuN with it.  (Like I don’t say THAT every year.)  In the past we’ve enjoyed garden plans for children by Sharon Lovejoy, whose writing I adore, by the way. 

Awwwww.  They’re sisters, after all.

The hellebores are pretty.  You have to get down on the ground and really appreciate them.  I know I do!  You would do that with me if you were here, right? 

More daffodils.

Lest you think I have forgotten about school work for my sweet boy Joseph, I have goals for him too:  Spell whatever word you like.  I know you can do it.

We are working on spelling, spelling, spelling.

Make the most of this day.

Lynn

Let me share a beautiful old Valentine’s Day postcard that I have in my collection of old postcards.

Little gold hearts, big red and pink hearts, Cupid’s arrows, and forget-me-nots.  What speaks more of love? 

Did everyone read something about Cupid this week?  We’ll be talking about Cupid tonight and reading more about Cupid in mythology.  We studied Cupid recently as he was right-smack-dab in the middle of the story of Apollo and Daphne.  In fact, I totally blame Cupid for Daphne getting turned into a laurel tree.  If I didn’t love gardening so much, I’d probably be mad.

Need more Valentine’s Day red? 

This is the view from my window yesterday as I sat at my desk and typed.  I love the bright red cardinals that hang out in our garden.   A few years back I even wrote an article about them for The Healthy Homeschool website. 

I know it’s not super clear because I’m cropping this out of a picture taken from quite a distance, but you can see that the real-life cardinal is enjoying the mosaic birdbath I made along with two ceramic birds incorporated into the design.

Hey, guess what?  Today is not only Valentine’s Day, but for us it is Big Furry Man’s birthday.  Yes it is!  He is 46 today.  Uh, he always picks on me for one month out of the year that he loves being married to a “younger woman” and now here we are at that month.

Okay, so I’ll be 46 next month and then we’ll be the same age again.  I guess I should just enjoy that one month that I get to be a “younger woman.”

As far as school this past week, I feel like we accomplished a few major things, in spite of my running around so much.  We finished Act I of Hamlet and are really enjoying it.  Joseph has said now that he’s very glad he’s reading it and that he was mistaken in saying he didn’t want to.  Michaela will still say that it’s boring and yet everytime I pull our copies of Hamlet off the bookshelf she yells, “I get to be Hamlet” or “I get to be the king.”  She wants the big parts. 

I am also pushing Joseph really hard in the spelling department.  I can tell the lightbulb has come on for spelling, just like it did for reading the year that he finally took off with reading.  We will have end-of-year testing in May and I want him to have really jumped up there in spelling. 

Michaela and I reviewed places she should know from her Five In A Row studies.  We pulled out our pretty little storage box of story disks and she began to place them on the world map:  Sri Lanka, Atlantic Ocean, Vermont, Australia, Arctic Ocean, Ungava Bay…

All I’ve got to say is who needs a chiropractor when you’ve got a child who can wrench your head around like this to look at the camera?  I’ve been aligned.  Also, I’m obviously on my lunch break in this picture, because I’ve got my typing gloves on.

Well, it’s off to the work desk this morning.  Enjoy your Saturday!

Lynn

This was first shared on a homeschool message board I frequent.   I wanted to put it here too.  It’s amazing!  And worth watching.

Here’s Willard Wigan’s website.

Lynn

Today’s a work day for me (sigh).  I’ll miss you today, blogland. 

It gets COLD when you sit for 8 hours and type. My gloves keep my hands warm and my fingers free to speed along the keyboard.

This morning I’ll sit down at my work desk with a lot of thoughts on my mind.  As Joseph’s graduation from our homeschool nears, how will we define whether or not we’ve been successful?  Will Joseph feel his education was a success?

There have been many obstacles.  Three heart procedures for my husband over the course of five years.  My having to somehow provide continuous medical insurance coverage.  Those were the two biggies. 

And yet, if homeschooling is going on, then it must be given just as much of a priority as everything else.  Add to the mix that Joseph deals with dyslexia big time, and the matter of success becomes even more complicated.  The last time we had him tested, his spelling scores…  Hmmm.  Do I share this on line? 

I don’t think he minds, especially if it helps someone else. 

He spells on a third grade level.  But his reading comprehension is 3rd year college.  The consultant said she’d never seen such a span.  Her words to me were that he’s compensating for his disability.  Very well.  He’ll be fine.  But how do you take notes in a college class if you write and spell slowly?  How do you ever prepare for college if you cannot remember from week to week how to spell “every” or “where?”

It’s tough.  As tenacious as I was regarding Joseph becoming a reader, which he surely is, I am bound and determined that he will spell well.  We are down to months left. 

A quotation I saw yesterday has been on my mind.

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”  ~Donald Kendall 

I have to just trust that if we keep working hard and pushing ourselves, we’ll end up exactly where we should be in time for graduation.

I always enjoy a work day when I have something major to turn over in the back of my mind all day.  More on this later.

Lynn

I sure wanted my mulch delivered today, but the tree service got rained out. 

It’s okay, though.  My daughter and I decided that if we can’t plant outside, we’ll plant inside!

I bought a little Jiffy Greenhouse and a packet of shasta daisy seeds. 

We also chose some seeds from a collection that I keep in an old, green McCoy planter.

The seeds are tiny, even next to a sweet little hand.  We planted three seeds into each Peat Pellet.  Fun.

Planting shasta daisy seeds is serious business.  We planted 3 seeds x 72 Peat Pellets, so that’s a lot of potential. 

Thankfully, I had already started supper earlier: a chunky, mostly-homemade spaghetti sauce with lots of bell pepper and onion and mushroom:

Venison Spaghetti Sauce

• 3 lbs ground venison, browned
• 1 large onion cut in chunks
• 1 large bell pepper cut in chunks
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• 1 jar of whole mushrooms
• 2 jars of Classico 4-cheese pasta sauce
• crushed tomatoes to your preferred thickness and taste
• seasonings such as oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, etc. to your liking

Simmer it all for a couple of hours and serve over Barilla Plus thin spaghetti. 

For dessert, my daughter and I made chocolate chip cookies.  I could have eaten 10, but I only at 3, and they were SMALL!!!

I did swing by Goodwill today on the way to get laundry detergent.  (We’ve been out for two days, so it’s Mt. Laundry at every turn.)  I bought only one thing.  I spent 52 cents.  It was a beautiful Degas print of Dance Class.  It is now on my kitchen cabinet with a bit of sticky-tack.

School Lessons:  Joseph read a lot today (always at least a couple of hours) and wrote a poem today.  He’s been talking about Edgar Allen Poe today.  Oh, he also watched Dances with Wolves as part of our study of early American writing/Native Americans.

Oh, and we have our first worksheet on line.  You’ll see the link at Dragon Speller.  We’ll be adding to this regularly.

Lynn

I just wanted to share a picture and a few thoughts this morning.  Last night I walked through the small foyer that surrounds the staircase in our home.  I looked up, and there on the little landing lay my 6-foot 2-inch, 200+-pound 16-year-old son, reading.  I had to smile.  (Then I grabbed my digital camera.)  I surmised that all his favorite places to read — the den, the upstairs bedrooms, my big office chair — were being occupied by someone else, so he found just any place he could to read. 

You can only know how thrilling this is if you have had a child that you struggled greatly (for years) to teach to read!  Joseph has dyslexia.  He looks at things differently from the rest of us, on and off the pages of a book, I might add.  I never did give up on him and was even determined that he would be a super reader.  My heart sings a song of thankfulness everytime I see him reading like this. 

For those of you who are teaching a child with dyslexia:  Don’t give up!

Lynn

Where in the world has summer gone????  Our school year started today and I feel so good about how much we are already getting done!  We did purchase Sequential Spelling II this summer. I put in a link to one of the levels, but actually we got If It Is To Be It Is Up To Me To Do It. It is geared more for adults/older students.  It’s a perfect fit for us.

Joseph has started working on his blog again:  Joe’s Word.  He’ll be putting in whatever strikes his fancy.  He is becoming better at keyboarding just from me standing around saying, “put your fingers on the right keys.”  LOL.  He did Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 16 two years ago, so he knows where to put his fingers on the keyboard. It’s just a matter of making him do that as a first choice! Boys, for some reason, don’t seem to like to use all 10 fingers to type with.

He is continuing on with his timeline notebook. 

 Putting in new entries whenever we come across something or someone not in there yet.  For example, Edgar Allan Poe, the person we are studying right now for Language Arts/Literature.

(Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe)

In addition, we are continuing on with Algebra.  Yes, we did not finish last year, and no, I am not worried about it.  Joseph’s love is language arts and writing, in spite of being dyslexic, and Don McCabe, the person who wrote the Sequential Spelling program, is certainly a wonder when it comes to teaching dyslexics to read and excell at writing!  Thanks to my Five In A  Row friends for the recommendation!

More later.  We are about to go to the library and get some more books for my voracious reader!  Yaay.

I really love my fellow rowers over at Five In A Row.  There is so much collective knowledge there, you can ask about just about any homeschool program (or decorating question… or cooking question… ~:-D ) and someone will have some information!

Anyway, I asked about a spelling program for my son with dyslexia – because we are not spelling, even though we are definitely reading – and the hands-down answer was Sequential Spelling. 

I cannot wait to get started with it and see how much progress we can make in spelling.

Here, if you want to take a look at an example of Sequential Spelling.

There’s a program for adults.  And another book that’s for older children or adults:  If It Is To Be, It is Up To ME to do it.

Thanks, FIAR girls!

I’ll let you know how it goes!!

Lynn