Teaching my son is ridiculously easy most of the time. He loves to learn, absorbs information like a little sponge, and is advanced enough in his math and language arts skills to help his sister when she gets stuck on something. Only rarely do we encounter any difficulties, and when we do it is always in language arts.
Little G's challenges in language arts are not due to the fact that the material is beyond him, or that he has any difficulty with comprehension; he is a year ahead of his peers. The challenge we face is directly related to his communication disorder. Our sticking points have been with getting him to understand when a sentence is a command, a question, an exclamation, or a telling sentence. More recently, he has difficulty with the positions of letters in certain spelling words. Based on these two challenges, I have realized that (a) my son does not rely on the sound of a person's voice for his information, but instead interprets what he hears as-is using logical cues, and (b) the way his brain processes the sounds he hears when a word is spoken to him (dictation for spelling words) sometimes results in him having the correct letters but putting them in the incorrect order. Since his earliest expressions of spoken language came out flipped in an almost identical manner, this is not a surprise at all.
Visually, Little G does great with spelling words. If it is something he has read in the past, he can spell it almost without fail. Similarly, if he is skilled at sounding out words - not in the phonics sense, but the actual correct spellings based on the rules of English and grammar he is familiar with from experience. Because of his speech disorder and his inability to make the thoughts in his brain form coherent speech on demand, especially when he is experiencing negative emotions (sadness, frustration), I spent a great deal of time teaching him sign language and handwriting so he had other communication options. We have been working on non-speech communication since we was 2 years old, and he has picked up an incredible amount in the past 4 years. He's gifted, no doubt, but I think his need to communicate helped.
We haven't seen his speech therapist in about a year, but she was absolutely wonderful. Her understanding of the various things which can affect speech acquisition and language went, in my opinion, far above and beyond what would be expected of any therapist. It was clear that her work was not simply a paycheck, but something she was called to do in life. Several times since our school year began, I have wished I could ask her questions about these language aspects of G's learning. I hesitated, knowing how much she already has on her plate, especially since my son is no longer part of that center. But finally this afternoon I thought, what the heck, why not? The worst she could do is refuse to talk to me, though I didn't think she would. So I waited until the end of the day, when I knew there would be no more appointments, and I called. She was just as kind and helpful as ever, and gave me a few great ideas to try with Little G. I will be starting them tomorrow. I got everything together after the kids went to bed tonight and I'm looking forward to finding out how this works (I will explain in a later post). She told me I could give her a call again if I had other questions, and I thanked her sincerely.
It was so nice that someone who owed us nothing at this point still cared enough to offer a few minutes of her time and some helpful suggestions. I've become used to the type of people who wash their hands and don't offer so much as a backwards glance the moment their necessary involvement is done.
In other Little G academic news, he knocked out about a full unit's worth of math in the past two days, and my Kindergartner is now just about where first graders (who started this course material in August) are, despite beginning 5-6 weeks after them. I am super proud of him!
My little Reezle girl has been up to some very cool things recently as well, and I will be sharing soon.
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