Reading, World Affairs and Planning

Reading: Capturing Boys waning interest in reviews, today we read a lengthy review of World of Warcraft's Burning Crusades expansion pack. By choosing something he is highly interested and motivated in I hoped to lessen his anxiety around school work and capture a generosity toward learning.

Boy is not a reader and has difficulty writing. Happy to read comics (Asterix is his comic of choice), the battle to get Boy into reading text and comprehending it, does my head in.

The use of graphics and social stories is well documented for children with Aspergers. In an effort to get boy to read a large amount of text that I knew would interest him, I copied it from the web site, enlarged it to 14 point font and added as many World of Warcraft pictures as I could. IT WORKED! Boy read on to understand what the next picture was about.

Boy and I took turns in reading paragraphs aloud to each other and then having a general chatty yarn around what the paragraph meant. He loved it. He became animated and eager to complete the rest of the mornings work so that he could take me to some discussed places in Burning Crusades. Oh the things I do for my child!!!!

World Affairs: Boy has a healthy general knowledge about worldly events, especially events from social history (my interest). What he doesn’t know a lot about though is American history and its significant social markers. I came across a neat, free calendar, from an American site (Parent Education) and printed it out to go through with Boy.

The date fields on the calendar contain interesting tidbits of history, nation days and gloriously useless bits of general knowledge: Things we love. We did an art and craft activity together to make the calendar look like the ones you buy in shops and have hung the calendar on the wall. Our school day will start with some brief research into the events mentioned on that day.

Today, thanks to Wikipedia, we learnt about Jackie Robinson and his involvement in Baseball and the civil rights movement. Boy had never heard of Wikipedia so that alone was a sparkling moment of learning.

Boy loved this activity and we have agreed that we will have a trivia quiz at the end of every month. The trivia will be gleaned from the daily calendar research and I will present Boy with 20 questions. Boy can re research the answers and 100% correct answers will win Boy the rest of the day off school. He thought this was a TERRIFIC idea.

Planning: To meet our home school registration requirements, our State Education Department demands a rough plan for the entire year. Together we broke our learning requirements into seven areas and decided upon some rough goals for each of our four school terms. While not set in concrete, they will provide a structure for us to work toward, even when we are gripped by obsessions and meltdowns.

Boy has set himself some hard tasks – he wants to learn French and Japanese. Does any body have any ideas of how I can do this for minimum cost?