2/31 Schooling

Too bad that 31 is a prime number or I could have had some fun with fractions!

Fractions fractions.   Yesterday I was trying to teach Hannah the nuances of dotted quarter notes.   Her newest piano piece has introduced dotted quarter notes. She understands tying notes together, but the blasted dot surely doesn't look anything like an eighth note.

For those of you who don't know, a quarter note has a beat of 1.  If you fit two notes into 1 beat, you have two eighth notes.   If you want to stick one eighth note on to a quarter note (you'd get 3/8ths mathematically), you'd have to count 1.5 beats.    Does this make any sense?  Of course not.  

Hannah absorbed about ZERO of what I was explaining.   And I don't blame her.    She does understand basic fractions.  We have those tiles that are divided into various fractions, and she understands cutting something in half, and then in half again to get fourths (or quarters...as in money).   But music timing doesn't make much sense to her.   She usually just memorizes the rhythm and doesn't count beats at all.  She leaves that up to me.   I personally don't think it matters much.  It's not a required life skill.

This year, which we call Sixth Grade, we are focusing on academic life skills--the 3 Rs.   Hannah would be in 7th grade if she was with her age-mates.   We had a 2nd grade, and a 2nd-and-a-half grade, so she's a grade behind, by name only.   She really is working on a spectrum of skills that range from 1st grade - 4th grade.  Reading individual words (vocabulary words) is one of her strengths, and I'd guess she's close to a 5th grade level.  I don't really know, because I never test her.   She is where she is.  And I just work on the next step she needs to take.

I did some thinking this summer, trying to distill what is holding her back, where is she weakest, and I revamped some of our curricula. (By the way--TANGENT WARNING--one of my BIGGEST pet peeves is when a homeschooling parent who cannot spell the word curriculum!  You'd think that the error they make is with the plural.  I can forgive "curriculums".   But I cannot forgive "cirriculum".  Sir Iculum it is not.  I'm sure this spelling error is not limited to homeschoolers, but, let's face it, other than educators, hardly anyone else uses the word.  And besides, there is ALWAYS spell check.)

The areas that need the most attention are writing, spelling, and math. Yes, her penmanship is very tidy, but still slow.  It's slow because she spends so much time figuring out how to spell words.  If she has an idea/answer in her head, she'll say it out loud.  But by the time she's written the first word in the sentence, she's forgotten what she wanted to say because the idea left when she was concentrating on the motor task of writing, as well as the mental task of spelling.  It's not automatic.   And it hasn't improved over the past few years.

So I decided to go back to Sequential Spelling.  We tried it a few years ago, but didn't stick with it.  This time it seems to be working.  She'll even ask to do her spelling first!

Here are yesterday's words.   She doesn't get tested on them--she figures out how to add the prefixes and suffixes, and builds words within families.

(Yes, they actually use the word "treeing"--as in, "The hounds enjoyed treeing the squirrel.")

For Language Arts and Writing, this year we are using materials from The Well Trained Mind.

I'm starting back at the beginning, making sure that Hannah's not missing key components in language arts and writing.   For now, it's very easy for Hannah.  She is doing copywork, memorization (poems), and narration (re-telling a story I just read to her).   

I never used a "programmed" curriculum before.   It's so easy!  I sort of feel like a fake--saying exactly what the book tells me to say.   But she's eating it up, and making progress.  

I'm not so sure that she (or I) would have been ready for this approach a few years ago.  

Another thing I'm introducing this year is keyboarding skills. We haven't started yet, but I am hopeful that by removing some of the motor task elements her writing will improve.

For math, we are still using Numicon, but I'm also taking a closer look at the Teaching Math to People with Down Syndrome.   We'll be using more games, money and calculators this year.   She loves creating a "store" and counting out dollars, dimes and pennies (we're not adding nickels yet, and quarters are totally confusing).

I have to mention that this summer we added another supplement, Longvida Curcumin to her protocol.   I discussed it with her pediatrician (whom we adore), and after reading the research, she thought it was worth a try. We didn't observe any changes over the first 2 months.  But then we gave her a week-long boost at a higher dose. Since then, she has been very interested in numbers.  She is always counting things and using ordinal numbers.  "That's the 9th time you said that, Mom." (that's typed in Adolescent Eye Roll font.)      And she was right. But maybe she should have listened the first time, instead of counting.

Disclaimer, of course:  I have no way of telling if the two things are connected  Math : Longvida Curcumin.   But it isn't hurting.  But it is very expensive.

We do lots of other stuff--right now we're reading The Little House books together.   We throw in some geography, calendar work, Thinking Skills books, nature stuff, etc.   Today she wanted to work with a dictionary, so she invented a game using the Bananagram tiles (similar to Scrabble tiles), picking a letter out of the bag, then finding a word in the dictionary that started with that letter, and writing it down.  Fine with me!   I told her she could play it 12 times.  Far be it from me to interfere with that kind of "playing"!

What I'm chasing down is not performance or mastery of any particular skill, I'd rather see her Think.  I want to help her learn to process information so that she can solve problems.   I don't think that average worksheets or memorizing math facts will necessarily will help her to do that.  I believe that reading good books results in good language patterns.  I believe that playing games can bring academic accomplishments and challenge social skills.  I believe that living life is much more effective a learning tool than learning about living life.

We spend focused learning time three or four times a week.  She can stay focused for 3-4 hours.  I should say that *I* can stay focused for that amount of time...I don't know how long she could last...   

A Little Bit of Homeschooling

That's all we're getting done these days. We've been busy with lots of learning, but not necessarily quantifiable learning. But just to provide some evidence of actual academic and critical thinking, I took a few pictures. (Still have not found the little video camera. I think Chris will have to cough up the digital camera he took to college and never uses. Spring Break isn't that far away!)

Here's a page of Hannah's Building Thinking Skills book. She loves it. And it makes her think.

Several times a week we've been setting up shop. Sometimes it's groceries, sometimes it's clothes, but this time it was our own Littlest Pet Shop. We collected some of Hannah's Pet Shop toys, and added in a few real pet things to our "store" . I mean, who could resist a chewed nylon bone with lint on it? Especially when it's only $0.66. Or, maybe you'd rather have a lizard for $0.50? A fish with half a tail? To get that beauty you've got to have 100 pennies. Or 10 dimes. Or a paper dollar. Or a John Tyler dollar coin.

Hannah is pondering her purchases.

We are only using pennies, dimes and dollars right now. I've been trying to get her comfortable with the two symbols we use for money. The "$" and the "¢ " . In addition to making American coins as confusing as possible, Americans also like to write things out like this:

$0.78, which we read as "78 cents". Does it say 78¢ ? No. What it actually says is "zero dollars and 78/100ths of a dollar". One more tick on the confusion side.

But Nan is learning that she can read it as "78 cents".

I made a whole bunch of price tags, some with $ and some with C. Some are easy amounts of money, and some are difficult.

She's learning how to pay exact change. And what happens if she doesn't have exact change. We're not even going to start thinking about nickels or quarters. Or sales tax (heaven help us). We're going in baby steps. And we're having fun!


We also have been making Valentines, baking, going to a new swimming teacher, piano lessons, drama, Pottery class (new this week!), yoga, library, going to Special Olympics swimming for the first time, playing in the snow (it will never melt...we got another inch yesterday), watching the Olympics and battling the new medical insurance for coverage for Hannah's CPAP.

May your Valentine's day be filled with love!

p.s. Argh at Blogger's formatting!

Numicon, Part 1

Here it is. The math you've been waiting for. Listen up, parents of children with Down syndrome: This is the math your child needs. If your child is struggling with math (and not all children with Down syndrome do struggle, but most do), consider this program.

I'm a pretty analytical person. I appreciate efficiency (even if I'm not always efficient). I have been homeschooling for 15+ years, and I've looked at hundreds of approaches to academic subjects. And, for the past decade, I've been researching Trisomy 21.

Here is my verdict: Numicon is an excellent curriculum.



It brings math within reach of our concrete learners! It starts with something I love: exploratory learning. It is open-ended enough that the student can create their own solutions to problems (what other ways can you make 9?), but yet structured enough that you won't be worried that they're just playing. For years Hannah has been able to add and subtract with numbers 1-10 (and a bit higher I suppose). She always needed some sort of manipulative (abacus, number line, fingers, unifix cubes, dice, etc. We used them all).

The plain old number sentences just were a "formula" that had to be solved for no apparent reason. It meant nothing to her. She knew the rules and she applied them, but it was all busy work, with no transference to her everyday world. We tried memorizing math facts, but that too didn't get us very far (and as you've seen, we LOVE flashcards for everything else). We looked at TouchMath and at Math-U-See, and Mathematics Made Meaningful. We tried different workbooks (Singapore Math, Miquon Math, Modern Curriculum Press, etc.), we tried homemade solutions, we tried the How To Teach Math to People with Down Syndrome and Other Concrete Learners (and even went to the author's seminar: NOT WORTH IT). The book does have some good ideas, but not enough for a full curriculum. What I was searching for was a way for Hannah to understand numbers. I want them to have meaning to her, just as words have meaning.

Hannah could do word problems. In fact, she loved word problems more than just number sentences, I guess because they told a story.

Uncle Dudley found 3 flowers in the front yard and 6 more in the neighbor's yard. He picked them all. How many did he pick? Did he get in trouble for picking his neighbor's flowers?

At least there is something interesting about the numbers in the sentence, and she could build it herself. But she still needed the number line.

Yet, when she'd set the table, and only pull out three forks, she would not be able to figure out how many more she'd need for our family of five. But now she can! It's coming....slowly but surely, she is figuring out numbers. She is starting to know, innately, that 6 is made up of 1 and 5, or 2 and 4, or 3 and 3. She can actually see that 11 is not the same as 1 and 1 (which, even though she knows is 2, she'd always make the same error). She knows it's 10 and one more. Or 5 and 5 and 1. One of the slogans on the Numicon site is, "Making numbers real". It's true. Math is now Hannah's favorite subject.

It's likely that you've never heard of Numicon before. That's because it isn't sold in the United States. Yet. It is a British curriculum. It was not created specifically for the Ds population, but it seems like it is! Sue Buckley's group, DownsEd, has utilized Numicon for years and has published several articles and books about utilizing Numicon with children with Down syndrome. The Down Syndrome Foundation of Orange County's Learning Program uses Numicon, among other educational approaches based on Sue Buckley's research. (an aside: earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend a day-long seminar with Sue Buckley. She covered a lot of ground, but didn't have enough time to do much with math. She's a very interesting person.) Coming from England, the cost for the Foundation Kit, plus the additional materials for Kit 1 would run close to $400, plus shipping costs (which are considerable). It's the single most expensive homeschooling curriculum I've ever purchased. And I wish I did it years ago. Imagine where she'd be if we started this five years ago!

Fortunately, Numicon now has a new package that is called "Closing the Gap". It looks like it would be a terrific supplement for a child who attends school, and it's more affordable. Also, Numicon is working to get a US distributor, so hopefully you'll be able to buy it here and save on shipping. If you homeschool, I'd recommend going with one of the complete sets (single user). Numicon is also a perfect math curriculum for typical children from the ages of 3-7 (or, possibly older, but I haven't gotten that far to know).

I know that Hannah is able to follow the "rules" of arithmetic, and will eventually use a calculator to solve most math problems (so do I!). But I really want her to understand numbers. I want her to own them, to know them inside and out. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting more about Numicon so you can get a feel for it, and see if maybe it's what your child needs too.