Sunday, September 26, 2010

doing lessons with a sensory-sensitive child

You may or may not know this, but Missa has some sensory stuff. Loud music, lots of lights, and many textures bother her. This is just one of the quirks that make her special and unique, but this is the most difficult one that we have to work with here. Anyway, I thought I'd share how WE handle sensory sensitivity with her in schooling.

She does most of her written work on a dry-erase board. So, here are a few pictures to show what I mean. A simple math lesson usually looks something like this:




While a writing assignment may look like this with her:




As you can tell, she has a slight aversion to paper at times. I can get her to work in her workbooks and do writing on a sheet of paper, but honestly sometimes it is just such a struggle that I don't fight her and hey, she enjoys doing her work on the board so why not? I find it interesting how she can be so different from her younger sisters some days, especially when she's having a rough day with her processing.

And credit on that math lesson goes to Math-U-See. Their demo DVD that you can get free has a place-value lesson on it, and I got the idea for place value "houses" from there. It totally works with her, after a few weeks of trying to help her understand place value and it not sinking in I did the houses and it stuck almost immediately.

new school year, REAL schooling area

I am so happy to really be into the swing of our new school year finally. It was definitely a rough start for us with Missa, but we got into it finally. Along with our having a second grader and a first grader this year, I have two preschoolers and me carrying a full time college courseload in Christian Ministry. This school year is a big one for us obviously, so we felt a need to get more organized.

So, how does a family get more organized to cover all these needs? Well, we started by creating a dedicated schooling area. Now, if you've ever been in our home you know it is a decent size (almost 1800 sq. ft) but the floor plan isn't one that allows a dedicated schooling area easily. The kids share the only bedroom (20x24 with three closets before you start judging, its more than big enough for them right now) and we sleep in the bonus room. Well, our room is L shaped, so we rearranged things slightly to put our bed in the nook of the room and now the main area is our homeschool/ preschool/ college area. On Labor Day, Scott tore out the carpet to expose the white tile floor under it (with some help from a friend of mine for one section, and from me and the girls for the remainder of it), then we spent that week rearranging and organizing it to allow us to put in the kids' desks, a bookshelf, a desk for my laptop, and our necessary supplies for the older girls' schooling. Since we got this set up, we've managed to pull full days of lessons each school day. Then today, we installed a couple shelves on the wall as the first step in expanding the shelf space in here, so that I could set up our preschool materials. And yes, I have lots of pictures to show where our schooling will take place this school year (and for the next few years while we take care of some financial things and I finish college).







It is far from finished, but it sure does feel good to have this setup going on here. I have a feeling that with all our materials readily handy like they are here, we will have a great year. The only thing that these pictures don't show is our portable large dry-erase board, which is what Missa does a large amount of her schoolwork on right now.