What to do when your child has what people called a "condition"?

It's been more apparent to us that Ethan has some trouble with focus.  In the past, people from co-op, have approached us about him not being able to focus during group lessons.  However, I treated it as something he will eventually outgrow, he was only 5 or 6 years old after all.

During this year of teaching him at home, spending more time one-on-one with him, I noticed that he gets distracted easily by little things.  It can be a sound in the background, a reflection from the TV, or just plain old backyard.  I often got frustrated having to reread passages and he still couldn't answer questions about it.  I thought he just unwilling to listen.  In addition, his Sunday school teachers have told us that they would have to call on him a few times before he would respond.  So taking all these into consideration, I finally realized that we need to look into this more and not waiting for him to grow out of it.

So we went to see a neurodevelopmentalist and had an evaluation done.  It turns out Ethan is hyper-auditory.  It means he's hyper responsive to both auditory and visually.  He has very strong peripheral vision and anything he sees becomes "visual play" and distract him from focusing on what is in front of him.  He is hyper responsive to even tiniest sounds around him and would get distracted by them and not hear what we're telling him.

However, it isn't as bad as it sounds, he doesn't need to be medicated or anything.  There are activities we can do with him such as number sequencing, reading comprehension practices, verbal direction activities that would help enhance his memory and focus.  I would have to do this daily on top of his schoolwork.  So far it's been difficult to actually follow through it all, but the times that I'm able to do them, I see little progress made.  It's still hard to get his focus at times, but at least I understand and "try" not to get angry or upset all the time over this particular issue.

I am trying to not treat this as a "condition" because it would become a crutch.  I'm constantly reminded that what might seem to be a "weakness" now can be a "strength" when he grows up.

2014 Conclusion

Praise God for another great year!  Despite the ups and downs, I cannot thank the Lord enough for all that He had bless us.  My husband always reminds me that compared to some families, we haven't gone through much "downs" - the kind of trials that could really do damage.  I have to agree with him.  I would say the only complaints I ever really had the past year were common to all moms - the daily grunt work of caring for 3 little ones.  However, the blessings that came with it all was well worth it.  Seeing each of them grew in different ways had given me tremendous joy as a stay-at-home and homeschooling mom.  Again, I cannot praise God enough and I need to.

Ethan had turned 7 this past November and I had already noticed the difference in his talking and mannerism that he's no longer a little boy.  In small ways, my oldest is starting to grown into a little man.  How I miss him as a little toddler, barely walking and wobbly in this steps.  

Noah had learned to get along with Bethany in his own ways.  In fact, he loves hanging out and asking his little sister to go down to play with him in the basement.  I really love their interactions and pretend-plays with each other.  It affirms our decision to homeschool when I see the sibling bond grows deeper each day.

Although Bethany is only 3, she talks and acts like a 5 year old.  Her strong maternal instinct truly amaze me.  There are times when I got hurt (which can be quite often give my clumsy nature) and was in pain, she would be the one crying out louder than me.  I ended up being the one comforting her and stopping her from crying.  Praise God for her empathy.  We had also been working together on the alphabet.  I often feel guilty that I don't spend enough time teaching her as I did with the other two, so I had started teaching her on the side during the school time.  She really enjoys it, especially when rewarded with candy....

All in all, the year 2014 had brought our family much joy.  God has been faithful in keeping our family under his wings.

Here are some fun things we did.

For History, we learned how to make quill pen with straw and pomegranate juice solution.  Cut straw in angle at tip then dip into solution.

Our girl is also a kinesthetic learner.  It was her idea to put the puzzle letters on the alphabet mat to match up.

2nd LEGO Stop Motion Movie

What do homeschooling moms do for Thanksgiving week?  A) School  B)Break?  C) Both?  The answer is C.  Of course we had to do school!  Well, it was very light school, we focused more on worship and bible time.  We were able to dive into some really nice spiritual conversations, like how we need to store our treasure in heaven rather than on earth, and that we don't need to worry when our provider is our heavenly Father.  The boys had lots to ask, it was truly a delight to see their interest in God's word.  This is the vision we had and intent to keep, to focus on building their godly character and not just on academics.  Praise God for this encouragement.

Instead of the regular Language Arts lesson, I thought it would be fun for Ethan to apply all the writing and spelling skills he learned by doing a project.  He's been working on a LEGO model for a while and wanted to do another stop motion movie, so we did!  I asked him to make up characters, setting, and write the script for the movie.  We worked on it together for 3 days, did Beginning, Middle, and Ending of the story.  He had so much fun writing the dialog of the characters.  After the story was written, our whole family took part in voice acting for the movie.  Then many pictures were taken with my phone, Ethan was the one to move each character and thought of their positions.  He totally got the concept!  Lastly, the painful part goes to mommy - movie editing.  I used Movie Maker to insert all the pictures, music and voices.  It took a long time and was challenging, but it was all worth it seeing how it ended.

So here it is on Youtube.  Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HCCEbGdhhM

Let's bake!

I have never been a baker and I don't particularly care about sweets, I am a salty snack person.  Lately, however, my non-baking world has been turned around all because of History and Bible lessons.  From History, we learned about American pioneers and how they used to make butter.  The curriculum included a recipe to make our own butter with just heavy whipping cream, so we gave it a try!  All it took was a glass jar, fill it up to half way, then close the lid tightly and shake for 15 mins.  My original plan was to have each of us take turns to shake for 5 mins, but guess who ended up shaking almost all the way....

We (or I) shook it until there's no swooshing sounds from the liquid, then viola!

Just add some salt and you have fresh whipped butter!

Then from Bible lessons, we learned about Jesus is the bread of life and the curriculum provided a bread recipe called Easy Yeast Bread.  It required very few ingredients and the boys got to learn how yeast works from this.  They each took turns adding the ingredients, then kneaded the dough, watched it rise in the oven, and finally did the taste test!

They gobbled it up in a few minutes for lunch!

It's been so much fun exploring these recipes with the boys, I look forward to making more healthy baked goodies with them!

Love learning!

Wow!  Can't believe is almost the end of 5th week of school!  This 5 weeks has gone by pretty steadily and quickly.  I used the first 2 weeks to test out the schedule that works best for us.  In my past experience, trying to time everything only caused stress and take away precious teachable moments.  I was always watching the clock and rushing so that we can squeeze as much as we can, keeping up with the curriculum.  This made me very irritable and teaching wasn't as enjoyable.  This time around, I wanted to do things differently.  I split up the teaching time into morning and afternoon.  Here is my schedule:

Worship/Bible
Language Arts/Math with Ethan (Noah teaches Bethany ABCs or numbers)
Language Arts/Math with Noah (Ethan plays with Bethany)
Snack break
Play outside
Lunch
History
Spelling with Ethan

I tried to put the time for each "subject" the first 2 weeks but decided to take it out.  It only gave me stress.  Sometimes it takes longer to teach a new concept for Math or Language Arts, so why limit the time?  We've enjoyed the outside time a lot, running, climbing, riding on bikes and scooters really help the 3 kids to bond, thrive, and learn even better.  They also got more opportunities to meet new friends at the playground.

Before the school year, I was pretty nervous about teaching History because I didn't enjoy it as a kid myself, and I wasn't sure how to make it interesting. Indeed, I didn't do too well the first 2 weeks, I was sticking to reading aloud the whole text and bringing it a lot of details.  I didn't feel that the boys enjoyed it at all and was afraid they would hate History because of me.  So what did I do?  I turned to my husband for help.  He looked over the History book, and bracket out the parts he felt are important, and left out the rest.  He believes that the boys are going to learn US History at least a couple more times in their schooling years, so it's okay to just teach the basic and not include too much details.  Thanks to my husband, I got my direction back!  Since then, I have greatly reduced the amount of text, and always make sure I draw on the board to help the boys visualize the stories.  Both boys end up loving History time!  Of course, the cool crafts included in the curriculum helped a great deal too.

Another encouraging thing is that Noah has started to LOVE spelling.  He's been working on phonic blends and reading more, so his confidence grew and he's constantly trying to spell and write words and ask us to read them.  What more can a homeschooling mom ask for when your son begs you to teach him how to spell?  Ethan also love his spelling tests and are doing great with them.  He looks forward to getting perfect score and be rewarded with ipad, wii time, or candy.

Another fun we added is baking on Fridays!  I bought a stand mixer and started with boxed brownies to corn muffins, and last Friday we made peanut butter cookies!

Ethan making Native American tepee

Different Native American housing in pioneer days

School has started!

Yes, school has started this week right after Labor Day.  However, I'm taking this week slow and easy, mostly to do reviews, work out schedules, and to establish rules and discipline.  We spent our mornings doing worship, reading, and math practice.  Nice and easy.

Thinking back about summer, it was great.  We didn't focus on academics and enjoyed our time together being out in the sum, traveling to Seattle, did a couple nature camps, etc.  All these things helped each kid to grow and mature.

For Ethan, even though we didn't do academics over the summer, he actually took the initiative to write, spell, and do math on his own.  That is very encouraging for any mom to see.  He also started to take up more responsibility as a big brother, teaching Bethany right from wrong...although sometimes he gets too bossy doing so.  One thing I was hoping he would grow more this summer is endurance.  He hates being hot and sweaty, whenever we went out to the playground, he would start complaining after 10-15 mins and wanted to go home. I really hope that we can work on this area over the school year through more outside play and the gym class he's taking at Learning Vine.  Another thing would be for him to be a better listener.  He's a visual learner so whenever I read something aloud, he loses his attention after a little while.  This goes with lectures from us as well.  So I hope that he will also grow in this area over the school year.

For Noah, he is still bouncy as ever.  I'm glad I signed him up for the nature camp this summer, he was not very good at classroom etiquette last year so this camp helped him to grow in this area.  He also grew in the love of reading bible stories, he's been begging me to read the whole children's bible to him this past few days and I was glad to do so!  He has been struggling to get along with Bethany, constantly picking fights with her, even though she's only 3.  I'm hoping they'll both learn to get along and understand each other better this year.

As for Bethany, it's been amazing seeing her language skills advanced so much this past few months.  She can even say "parallegram" and "tyrannosaurus". However, it's also been hard to discipline her, she is a very stubborn girl.  She struggles in the area of nagging, and I mean, constantly nagging...for food!  You have terrible two's and three's are trying!

We will start next week with full curriculum and schedule, so hopefully we'll manage and have fun at the same time!

Prepping for school because summer is almost OVER!

I can't believe that summer will be over in a few weeks!  I can feel the pressure simply by going to Walmart yesterday...seeing the parents frantically getting school supplies at the last minute.  Although I won't be starting until after Labor Day, I still feel pressure to prepare for the school year ahead of time so I won't be rushing the last minute.  As a homeschooler, not only I have to get all the supplies ready (including potential art supplies for projects), I also need to look over the whole curriculum, throw away old papers, store away old books, etc.  Arghhh!

This year we are continuing with My Father's World curriculum - 2nd grade for the boys.  What I like about MFW is the multi-age teaching it provides so I don't have to get separate curriculum for each child.  Also, starting in the 2nd grade level, the curriculum set doesn't include Language Art and Math.  This design allows parents to get level-appropriate books since some kids might have advanced skills in these particular subjects or some might need more help.  Ethan is technically going into 1st grade but his reading skills is about 3rd grade and can already spell some basic words on his own.  However, there are other Language Arts skills that he needs to learn, so I bought the suggested 2nd grade level Language Art books from the curriculum.  While looking through the curriculum, I did have a frantic moment because of the addition of History this year...thinking of how to fit it all in the schedule.  However, this curriculum is designed for 2nd grade or 3rd grader so I might just spread it over to next year, depending on how well he gets the concepts.  Knowing this, I feel less stressed. Also, a good mom friend reminded me that it's not about how much you teach but how much they learned.  So I will take it slow and have fun with each subject....hopefully!

The boys will also do enrichment class at park district and Learning Vine, both will have gym this year.  Hopefully they will grow in their sportsmanship skills while building up their bodies.