Ahhh, I love the peace of the day after Christmas after the chaos of 3 family gatherings (two at our house) in a 24 hour time period. We came, we saw, we ate and unwrapped. And today we lounge and graze on leftovers. Some of us (not saying who) didn’t make it out of our jammies.
Today was the day to try out the new stuff. Jordan baked a cake in her new easy bake oven and had a tea party (with invitations and proper attire) with her new baby doll. She’s also made countless deposits and withdrawals into her new working ATM machine. Her favorite gift may just be the activity book we got her—the Klutz “Only Dot-to-Dot…. Book You’ll Ever Need”. I think she thinks it was written just for her.
Aubrey tore into her new board game Heroscape—a kind of 3D Magic as far as I can tell. And she has almost assembled the 3D puzzle globe. Oh, and the Marine Mania expansion pack to her zootycoon game has resulted in a lot of new species. Hmmm. Maybe I should have subtitled this what a Visual Spatial kid plays with after Christmas, lol!
Alex is dying to get started on all of his new lego kits—airplane, crane, motorcycle and cars. So far today his sisters drug him into various things and all we’ve cracked open are a couple of board games. The surprise hit—a stuffed lizard with a book that goes along with it. Well, the book hasn’t been touched (sigh!) but he carries Stripe the Prairie Skink around with him everywhere.
We got so many new games that we’ve only gotten to break in a few—Pirates of the Caribbean LIFE, Battleship, The Touch Game (sounds weird, but it is a hit so far—you have to reach in and try to pick out the plastic figure listed on a card by touch only—my little sensory challenged toucher of everything is quite the master at it!).
We finished off the day with a family movie and a serious munch down on what is left of the Christmas goodies. I think I’ve almost recovered from the holiday now.
Since the kids enjoyed our Greek feast so much, we decided to make some Greek Baklava. According to some research I found, Greek seamen ran across a baklava type dish in ancient Mesopotamia and brought the recipe to Athens. They improved on the dish by mastering the technique of rolling the dough as thin as a leaf. The name “Phyllo” means leaf in the Greek language. It soon became a dish of wealthy households for special occasions starting around the 3rd century B.C.
Here they are hard at work.
It was quite yummy–and amazingly goof-proof.
I’ve enjoyed reading Steph’s (my3feistykids.homeschooljournal.net) notes about visual spatial learners and I’ve decided to start compiling all the thoughts knocking around in my head about what I’ve learned (or still wonder about) how my kids learn. I’ll start with Aubrey, who I’ve recently decided could quite possibly fit the description of a visual spatial learner.
Aubrey was precocious out of the box. And always moving. When she was three the Montessori preschool she attended had to make a new playground rule—no walking across the top of the monkey bars. She read really young and it was one of the few quiet activities she would pursue. The Montessori environment suited her hands on need to move around learning style but at kindergarten she started the public school. There she both amazed and flummoxed teachers who told me she was extremely intelligent and they just couldn’t comprehend why she had so much trouble getting her ideas organized and down on paper. In second grade the timed math tests and spelling tests made her feel stupid for the first time in her life—despite the fact that she was working on math concepts several grade levels ahead at home for fun and was reading literally anything she could get her hands on.
We moved her to a private school for 3rd, but unfortunately it closed after that year and so she went back to public school (oh we were slow learners! But at the time I was working significant hours and told myself anything otherwise was just not possible). This time she went back with a dual dx of adhd/gifted. So they put her in a gifted pull out once a week where the teacher had the same reaction—she is smart but can’t get herself organized and her projects often didn’t get completed timely or didn’t seem to be up to her potential. The pullout itself caused problems as she would forget to go, forget to get the work she missed and she was constantly coming home with slips saying she didn’t bring something or other to class on the date due. I had figured out she had a kinesthetic learning style and needed lots of hands on—though most of the school subjects she seemed to learn by osmosis and her grades were good, if not stellar. By sixth grade she composed her most coherent essay to date—a persuasive essay titled “Why I should be homeschooled”. I read it. I listened.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could say and then it was sunshine and roses ever after? Ha, living with someone that has no sense of time, forgets what she was told to get on the way to get it and asks for help (only occasionally) on math problems without being able to provide any clue on the steps already taken can be challenging. Organization is a constant struggle. Somewhere along the way someone asked me if I thought she could be a visual spatial learner and they sent me a link. Although the lines are pretty fuzzy between the list of characteristics of someone with adhd and a visual spatial learner, it certainly did seem to fit. I emailed a self-questionnaire to Aubrey and she responded that she had checked yes to 13 out of the 15 and the other two she just wasn’t quite sure on. Discovering this about herself has been an incredible eye opener for Aubrey. It helps her to see her strengths, and understand why some things are difficult for her—without as much of the negative connotation of the adhd label.
So, what has worked? Luckily she excels at math enough that I just mostly take a hands off approach and let her work through the problems, test her answer and I don’t bug her about HOW she gets to something. She doesn’t have to sit through a teacher teaching a long sequence of instructions on HOW to do the math problem—steps that generally were unnecessary at best and confusing at worst. Now that she is past the stage of focusing on the ability to perform quick calculations and she uses a calculator, SHE realizes that math comes naturally to her. We occasionally have problems when she doesn’t know how to explain what is confusing her (though her vocabulary is excellent, her ability to explain something coherently and sequentially is just above her ability to write it). We do lots of hands on science. Lapbooks work well. A big hit are the higher level coloring books such as the Botany coloring book whose pictures seem to imprint on her brain as she is coloring them. She has been into robotics and quickly assembles robot kits and has enjoyed doing extra experiments on the seibun one (www.seibunusa.com). She enjoys working with the snap circuits. She retains most of what she reads and says she sees pictures in her head as she reads and was quite quizzical when I asked—as if anything else was possible. And of course computers make everything not only palatable but also interesting. Writing Strands has made writing almost tolerable as long as we don’t do it very often. We have yet to find something that will help her organize her work, her time, her life—part of the problem is that she is going through a stage where she is determined that she does not have to do anything but I’m trying to implement some of the strategies of visualization recommended in the “Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World” book.
One aspect mentioned often in the “Right Brained…” book are the sensory sensitivities common in right brained thinkers. Though Jordan was dx’d very early on with Sensory Processing Disorder, Aubrey has never had the same issues. She is often so “in her head” that she is oblivious to her surroundings. Though she has been a somewhat picky eater and definitely likes comfy clothes, she does not have the extreme sensitivities. I also would not say she picks up easily on the emotions of others and has a more scientific/logical bent—maybe a bit of left brainedness sticking out?
One thing I read that was interesting in the “Right Brained…” book is that the free school idea (which would closely mirror unschooling) is often not the best option for right brained visual spatial thinkers. My experience would lead me to agree. Though I respect unschooling and have many friends who say that if I just let Aubrey deschool long enough it would work, when I’ve had more unschoolish phases it really hasn’t worked well. Aubrey asks me to provide structure. She has set a goal of completing Algebra and Geometry this year so that she can take an online course on video game design that has these courses as prerequisite but she does not feel confident in her planning ability and has asked that I break the coursework down into scheduled assignments. So I help, while still hoping to draw back enough for her to start learning how to organize her time her. Though it will be necessary for her to develop an inner structure at some point, part of homeschooling for us is providing structure and then continuing to slowly back off to help her learn to sequence and plan her activities. I still have days where I worry that she will struggle keeping to the schedule of a left brained world as an adult and worry that she will not be able to “live up to her potential”—whatever that means. But then I wonder what interesting job she will end up doing—-designing video games, working in engineering, a research scientist living in a hut in the jungle? My biggest goal in homeschooling her is to provide her a path (possibly the less traveled one) that will play to her strengths.
It’s been a while so I thought I’d spill out what we’ve been doing lately so I feel a bit like we’ve accomplished something 
Jordan and Alex have been reading “Absolutely Lucy” 
to me during reading time and, for at least Jordan, this seems to be the breakthrough book for her. Suddenly she is reading chapters fluently. It is written at an easy reading level, but has chapters that are several pages with just a picture or two and both of their comfort and speed in reading has just skyrocketed. The other day Jordan came up and spelled a very long word and asked what it was. When I told her she continued reading and had finished the paragraph and started the next when I realized she had Aubrey’s copy of “The Penultimate Peril” and was reading it. She proudly announced that she could now read anything. A bit of overconfidence never hurt anyone in regards to reading!
We’ve also made a leap in writing. Instead of journal writing we are doing more story starters. They both have an easier time thinking of more varied things to write when it is a story. The journals were starting to become repetative “Today is Monday. I am doing writing. Tomorrow we are….”. Alex still tries his best to think up really easy words and short sentences, but Jordan’s writing is so much more complex than she has the ability to spell. Which would be fine, but she MUST spell all words exactly correct. Her spelling dictionary is helping, but she still needs a lot of help. Alex, on the other hand, is happy to approximate something reasonably phonetic for his spelling as long as he’s not slowed down by having to ask or look something up.
We are up to ancient Greece in SOTW and Alex is really getting into the mythology characters. A surprise hit was our greek feast. We ate grapes, goat cheese, pita and hummous, Greek olives (ok, these were not a hit) and dates and everyone asked if we could do a meal for every place we studied. I’ve printed off and hope to be brave enough to try baklava to finish off the Greek unit.
My work schedule is really really light right now so I’ve had the time and energy to add a lot of hands on stuff and it is really making school go well. For our measurement unit in math we played a game estimating and guessing which containers would fit the most cups of water and if the snow ever melts we are going to tie into our studies of ancient Greece and measure out some olympic events. We’ve been studying the senses in Science and have played lots of games for that as well.
Aubrey has been working on some robotics stuff and recently put together a solar mars rover kit 
and has been doing the extra electronics projects from http://www.seibunusa.com/ . We’ve also discovered http://www.squeakland.org/. It amazes me what is offered free out there. I downloaded the Squeak program and she has been busy going through projects learning how to make simple programs. She has finished the first half of Elementary Algebra and now that she has discovered how much geometry is in computer graphics programming she is going to start working through geometry next. We’ve also been watching the videos we got over the summer (again–FREE!) from http://www.hhmi.org/catalog/main?action=getCategoryListing&catId=2 and we’ve had a lot of interesting discussions about evolution and how it works together with our Christian beliefs. She is going to be at training to become a soccer ref for next season all day tomorrow and Sunday.
Whew! I was right. I DO feel like we’ve accomplished a lot lately. Day by day it seems like we’ve often been distracted by dentist visits, oversleeping, daddy being home for the day….