No Time to Blog!

I haven't been blogging all that much lately for a variety of reasons which, all put together, are really eating up the little spare time I have ever had to do so.

Our family has received a big blessing in the form of a Virginia Medicaid "waiver" which, if all goes through, will give us the money to pay for an attendant for Samuel for his "medical" needs, his ability to dress and care for himself and to remain safe during the day. In the last two weeks I have been hiring and training two attendants, who either attend or have graduated from an area college. Everything is approved, I'm just waiting for a final confirmation about the number of hours of assistance we will be getting.

I have also been very busy putting together "work" for Samuel to do. We finally finished reading the book about whales. I'm preparing a "test" for him to take early next week. I'll share the worksheets and study sheets about this as soon as I can. I have been reading books to all the boys about Benjamin Franklin and George Washington at bedtime, so I have been making up worksheets and study sheets for Samuel about this.

After assessing Samuel's handwriting skills the past few weeks I have decided to delve more into Handwriting Without Tears (HWOT). Samuel learned to print upper case letters with this method at school. I'm not sure how closely this was followed to teach him lower case letters. In any case, he has had trouble writing within the lines on traditional kindergarten-size lined paper but seems to do better when I used HWOT ruled paper. I can get some of this from abcteach.com website, but I have gone ahead and ordered some supplies from HWOT as well. I plan to use this method for my rising kindergartner and if I can I will teach them together. We'll see.

A semi-annual review of Samuel's already in-home services is coming up next week. This is causing my husband and I do lots of thinking about Samuel's school situation. I will talk more about this when I am able to (after our meeting next week).

I'm sorry that I haven't been keeping up with my blogging "support group" that much lately, but I will get back in touch as soon as I can.

Working at Samuel's Pace, Not Mine

I have not sat down with Samuel for "worktime" as frequently in the past few days. That's okay, he is getting it 3 hours per morning with our in-home helper. Let's see, late last week I pulled out a "Handwriting Without Tears" book for him to do some lower case letter practise. He is used to doing these at school but he had not done any for me at home before. He protested quite loudly! He accepted it much better the next time I got it out.



We have been reading a book about whales for quite a while. It is a Random House "Step Into Reading Book." This series of books has 5 different levels for the various stages of reading readiness. This particular book, "Whales, The Gentle Giants" is a level 3, which is for "Reading on Your Own" grades 1-3. This is a bit above Samuel's ability. He does not seem to be able to handle reading a page when there are more than one or two sentences on it, in big type. When we read this book I cover some of the sentences, I read and then let him read a word or a simple sentence here and there. Sometimes I have to cue Samuel to read the word but often he will read it on his own if he hears that I have paused a bit.

Reading through this book has been very slow going. I thought maybe we would read the whole book in 2 or 3 days, but instead we only read one page each time we work on it, which isn't even every day. I'm planning to take it on our vacation, and I bet we won't even finish it then. I was beginning to wonder if reading this was at all worthwhile, but I changed my mind about this a few days ago. I asked Samuel "What would you like to read?" He looked on the shelf in our kitchen and selected the whales book! Then yesterday, after reading our page I had a worksheet for him to do. He wasn't ready to work on it right away. He picked up the book and looked at the pictures and then looked ahead in the book. I let him do this for a few minutes and was just thrilled! I love to see him browse through books!

This is one of those instances where I have a goal in mind for working on something, but I have to adjust it based on how Samuel is able to to work. Also, I have to remember that Samuel may not always communicate his interest in something as "visibly" as I might expect. This can be true of any of our children, whether or not they are autistic!