School Work , Part I, "Work Time I"

It has taken a while, but finally, as we are entering the last quarter of Samuel's school year, there is a pattern to our school day. On our best days we sit together four or five times at our kitchen table to do school work. I'll talk in this post about "Work Time One", the first time we sit together. This session usually includes CALENDAR, HANDWRITING, ENGLISH, and TIME.



"CALENDAR" is done with an average sized wall calendar, along with a laminated page for the current day. Samuel's job is to fill in information for that day, with velcro-backed pieces that he has to select off another laminated page. First he crosses off the previous day on the wall calendar. Then I might prompt him by saying, "Today is the _______" and I wait for him to say the correct date. After that, I lay the laminated page in front of him that he has to fill in. He then has to look at the other page to select the correct day of the week, month, date, year, and the weather. After filling it in he has to read it out loud. The laminated pages were made by a previous in-home helper. Samuel had another calendar to fill in previously, but this current one was made about a year ago. At first, he had to be prompted EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, and only three of four possible selections could be placed in front of him. When I started doing the calendar with him I could put more selections in front of him, but I still had to prompt him every step of the way. Now, I can place all the selections in front of him and on most days I hardly have to prompt him at all.



"HANDWRITING" involves practising his printing. My goals for this year were to review all the letters with him and to address his problems of placing them correctly on the page. Next school year we will work more on choosing correctly between using upper case or lower case letters.

We just finished reviewing all the letters a few weeks ago. "Y," both upper and lower case, "n", "a", and "u" were also problems. A few months ago I started prompting Samuel to place the letters correctly on the paper by having him read, "I can write neatly between the lines," before he did his exercise. This prompt has helped a bit, he is doing a better job of following the lines on the paper. Now we are talking about where we correctly start our upper case and lower case letters on the paper. At the beginning of the school year he did not like for me to say anything about his writing. It's still tricky trying to say anything to him as he is doing his work. Though it is very slow going, the written prompts (which he reads day after day after day) are better for getting through to him as opposed to verbal prompts to make corrections.

We use "Handwriting Without Tears." He just completed the kindergarten book. I'll take the next month or so to review problem letters, work more with proper letter placement (making up my own exercises), and I will have him start the next level book after that.



"TIME" In this lesson Samuel is learning how to tell time on a clock face. He could tell time on the hour, half hour, and 15 minute marks at the beginning of the school year. I have been trying to teach him to the 5 minute mark. We use a talking teaching clock for this. He does well up to 30 minutes after the hour. For minutes higher than this, he often gets confused about the hour, since at this point the hour hand points more to the next hour number on the clock. So far, the best approach has been for me to write out a series of times he has to put on the teaching time clock. I start at the top of the hour and go ahead from there. At first I only had him try four different times. I just recently moved it to ten times to complete. This lets us try lots of different times within the same hour. As he gets more comfortable with this I will start to fade out the earlier times in the hour, until he can successfully find times like "8:50" . Right now if I was to ask him to find this he would place the hands at "7:50", since at that point the hour hand looks like it points to 8.



In "ENGLISH" I have Samuel completing a first grade workbook. We are currently working on contractions and correct sentence punctuation. At the beginning of the school year I had to re-type all of the lessons from the workbook into a larger font, he could not work out of the workbook. Now we are able to use the workbook most of the time; I use a cover on the page so he only sees the current problem and I only have him do four or five problems at a time.