Monday, November 30, 2015

School Daze

A Monetessori type activity. Dominic did very well with this, but got bored quickly
Ah homeschooling has been a difficult task for us this year. We started the year with online public school, but found it to be a very difficult task for us. It was very rigid, and there was A LOT of work every day, the phonics lesson alone was an hour and there were days when he had to do two lessons in one day. It definitely didn't feel flexible, and it started to be such a fight just to get Dominic to sit with me and do anything. That is not what I want school to be like for us.

Then we tried some unschooling, but it switched quickly into laziness and we accomplished very little. I decided that this was unlikely to make anyone successful. We had purchased a preschool/kindergarten set of curricula from Catholic Heritage Curricula and I decided to give that a try again. It is sort of workbook-ish, but it is such a small amount of work that, so far, it has gone well. Also, this adds religion in, which is definitely a big part of why we want to homeschool anyway, and I've been impressed with Dominic's knowledge and how quickly he has caught on to new concepts.

This was an attempt at an art project. We used sponge cut into a heart shape and dipped in green. Dominic was not impressed



He has a difficult time with scissors, he refuses to let me help him hold them with one hand, but I'm trying to let him cut it anyway. 

He does a very good job of gluing though. ;-)

I really like the picture of the number displayed on a hand, he's able to know those on site, which makes him feel better

Dominic doesn't like to color, but he does enjoy telling me what color to do


Friday, November 6, 2015

Speech and Occupational Therapy - Oh My!!

Christopher has Medicaid! He has started OT and SLP! He is making progress!! Hooray!

**yes, I do know that I haven't posted here in a really long time. I have been thinking and thinking of blog posts, of wanting to get back into it, but for various reasons just haven't gotten to it. So here I am, making an attempt.**

So, after a long, painful application process; Christopher's Medicaid became active in September and we wasted no time in getting some therapies started. He is doing exceptionally well with OT and moderately well with Speech.



We are getting some great techniques to help calm him down when he's upset. Specifically brushing. We aren't doing the whole protocol, but we are definitely finding that it helps calm him down when it's necessary. Even Dominic has gotten in on it.


We've started using his headphones at Mass and have really seen some improvement in his behavior and emotions there. Even other people have noticed and mentioned to Jason one Sunday.

He has recently been really preferring Jason to me, so much so that he not only rejects me when Jason is home, but he often doesn't want any comfort from me during the day. This has been...emotional for me. It's been a little rough. I think that there is something that he needs, that I'm not giving him, and because of the lack of communication, he can't tell me. When Jason is home, he's so happy that he doesn't need whatever it is he does during the day. That's my completely unprofessional opinion. ;-)

We played with play-doh earlier this week and Christopher amazed me. He normally just tears the play-doh into tiny and tinier pieces. This makes him happy, he enjoys it, so it's still a win. But the other day, he did this:


He figured out how to work that and just kept making a snake, then putting it back in and making another. He was intent. And happy. We played a long time. So now our play-doh is in one bucket: 


But that's just fine.