This is what we are doing.......

A good friend pointed out that there aren't many resources out there to help families that are homeschooling special needs and/or autism children.  So I promised to start sharing what we are doing.

First off, we are loosely following the lesson plans from Lesson Pathways.  I say loosely because I tend to refocus a lot of the lesson plans.  And there is no time limit for a lesson.  If it takes a couple of weeks then it takes a couple of weeks.  Some, like the language arts lessons, I plan for a two week span and then expand it if necessary.  So far it really hasn't been necessary unless he's gotten ill.

To keep on track of things I've been using Home School SkedTrack.  I put the lessons in as I plan them and prep for them.  Then I make any changes on the day we do them and mark the plans done.  It is proving to be a great way to keep up on the paperwork portion of homeschooling.  In addition, I plan as far out as I can reasonably do so.  The result is that each day all I have to do is pull up the "today" section and I know what we are doing.  No stress.  It's great!

Ok, so the first lesson I'll go over with you is the one we just finished for Language Arts.  We were reading Good Night, Gorilla.  This book is a hoot and has very, very few words.  The focus for the tutor was that my son learn to sequence the animals and the action sequence of the story.  She did this by having him color pages of the animals and put them in order.  She also made copies of some of the pages for him to put in order.  He did really well.

My focus was for him to learn the animals represented in the story.  So each day's lesson involved watching a video of an animal on YouTube first.  Then he would do a coloring page of that animal.  Then we would look at printed pictures of that animal.  Finally he would match all of those things together and point out the drawings of that animal in the book.  All of these things were very easily found online by Googling the title "Good Night Gorilla" for the pages and prints.  And then searching on YouTube for the individual animals.  I learned a few things myself, such as hyenas are much larger than I thought they were.  For the final three days working on the story we read the book and then worked on him identifying pictures when I asked him for a specific animal.  Like his work for the tutor, it went fairly well.  And when we get a zoo visit in later this year, I'll check the book out again.  And pull back out the pictures.  That way he can make even stronger mental connections between the different images.

See...not really hard.  You just have to define your goals and not get too expansive.  There will be time to learn everything.  Next we are working on emotions again.  This was something we did earlier when we read Sebastian's Roller Skates.