First Week of School for 2020-2021

First Day of School Pictures

Favorite book: Biscuit books 

She wants to be a dentist when she grows up

They are so excited to get started. Our kids thrive on structure and routine and do best when they know what will happen for the day. That is the joy of homeschooling, we can design it how it works best for our kids and our family.

This year we are using MasterBooks. This will be our first year using it so I will give a review on what I think about six months in. Coming from a strong Abeka style teaching this is a hard switch for me but I want to make the right choice for the kids and I think this might be it. I will say choosing a curriculum for several children with special needs but each having a huge difference in their skill and understanding level is quite the challenge. Two of our kids struggle with fine motor, two different children struggle with memory issues, one struggles with executive functioning skills. Trying to find something that will work for ALL of them is HARD.

between subjects is break time

the kids are invited to pick anything off the school shelves to read or work on

Since our kids are missing out on speech (all five would normally be having speech weekly), we are trying to continue to build communication skills and language skills by working on a sentence building. We love these worksheets we found on Teachers Pay Teachers because they get to work on cutting, gluing, reading, problem solving, writing, drawing, and comprehension. 

These worksheets were also found on Teachers Pay Teachers and are reading comprehension sentences. The child reads the sentence and matches it to the correct picture. 

Every morning after breakfast the kids get out a puzzle to work on

this helps focus them, prepare their minds and bodies to work, and helps develop problem solving skills

 

Then it is time to do phonics reading work

And practice piano 

Learning about Landmarks and matching the figures with the cards

we are learning about birds and getting in some bird watching

Learning about science and what a hypothesis was. We did an experiment to see if a rock would sink or float then they drew a picture of their rock in the jar of water. 

We are working on learning virtues. Our first virtue is diligent.

  

 With our phonics program that we are doing, in some ways for some of our kids, it is a lot of review. However for some of our kids it is a challenge. Kids with Down syndrome are visual learners for the most part. One of our readers is amazing at reading words and is at a 2-3rd grade reading level but that is all memorized. Sounding out words, holding each sound in their heads and then blending them together for words they have never seen before can be a challenge so even our good readers are benefiting from the phonics program.

to help reinforce sight words for we want them to have fun so we do a paper where they have to find the sight word and stamp it. It makes it a lot more fun when they get to use the stampers or bingo dobbers or other things like that.

I love these puzzle money cards. It helps our kids learn about money in a fun way without pressure.