Homeschooling Convention

My current mood is:

This weekend was the annual homeschool Convention in town. I had a blast yesterday! I took several informational classes and came home ready to start! I think I have finally narrowed down exactly what type of homeschooling we will do this year. With my children being so close in age, it looks like unit studies will work great for them! So, I bought one thing to get us started this year - a Space Unit Study. My boys are very interested in the space shuttle and the planets, and since I have been getting a lot of questions about it the past couple of months (since the last school year ended) I thought it might be a good idea to start with that this year. Cassidy is pretty much into whatever the boys like at the time, so I'm sure we can involve her very easily as well.

Before the convention, I was beginning to get very nervous about teaching Joshua at home. Scratch that. I haven't been nervous about the teaching - it is the end of the year evaluation that has had me concerned. Because of our laws and his age, we don't even have to worry about this until next year, so it is probably really crazy of me to be so uptight about this right now. Anyhow, because of the classes that I took yesterday, I am much more at ease now. The law states that the child must perform to the best of his ability, not that he has to be at grade level in every subject. So, if we choose to our method of evaluation to be that his portfolio is evaluated by a certified teacher, so long as I state in there that he has been diagnosed with High-functioning Autism, they will take that into consideration when looking at his work for the year. He has to show improvement and that is basically it. Thank goodness! That made me feel so much better. So, now we can progress at the speed he is comfortable and able to go at, and not what the school system feels he should be doing.

I wanted to mention some of the classes I took yesterday...

The first class was on processing disorders. The speaker is a local speech pathologist and her speech was very interesting. She believes that we have eye gates, ear gates, and motor gates and these all work together to help us with the learning. A great deal of what she explained made total sense and I was able to relate some of it to Joshua. She mentioned about the eyes and the visual processing disorder. The way she explained it, we have two types of muscles in our bodies - smooth and striped. Smooth muscles are unable to be controlled by us (involuntary) such as the stomach muscles. Striped muscles are those we can control (voluntary) such as the muscles we find in our hands. The eyes have six muscles and are the one part of our body that has BOTH types of muscles that it uses. She believes that since the eyes are formed in such a way that the shape can be changed, that children who squint and blink a lot may in fact be trying to change the shape of their eyes and get the smooth muscles working properly, and if they can't in causes visual processing disorders. It also could cause them to change focus quickly, Does Joshua have this? I have no idea. He does do an odd blinking and squinting thing with his eyes, so he could very well have it...or it could be something else or nothing at all...or it could just be the Autism. But, it does give me more to look into and research. LOL Anyway, this is the therapists site, and she probably explains it a whole lot better than I can! www.MerrittSpeech.com

Let's see...the second class was Homeschooling 101. This was a two hour long class and full of info! There was a brief intro to our state's laws, a discussion of the pros and cons of each type of homeschooling, dealing with the "S" word (socialization), and testing. It was by far the most informative class I could have taken.

I then took a class about one of the curriculums. I kind of got tricked into that one. LOL The title of the class was "Teaching without Textbooks", and it turned out to be about a curriculum that is not textbook based, but literature based. It was pretty interesting, and if I was loaded with cash I probably would have grabbed it! However, seeing as how the speaker has three kids and had to buy 2 curriculums for them at $1000, I figured that it may be neat to just listen and get some ideas. LOL I did get one really helpful bit of info! She listed her daily schedule and it would totally work for our day! And it involves 4 hours of teaching for the day - ours would be a little less seeing as my kids are all younger than hers are.

I then took a class called "Learning In Spite of Labels". This was based on the book of the same name by Joyce Herzog. The speaker went through the book and gave us the 25 teaching techniques we need to remember. The first and last were the most important and they were "Thank God and PRAY". This was one of those classes that in many ways the info given was common sense, but very good reminders as well.

I know there were more classes and I met a lot of people...these were just the main ones that stuck out. I feel totally inspired after yesterday and can hardly wait to get started with the school year. :)