Friday 9-20-14, Oh The Thinks You Can Think

So I've been being greeted ever morning this week with "nooooo, not school again!"   "Mommy, cancel school!"  And I'm thinking, this is not how I want things to go.  I think I may need to take it easy today and take the weekend to decide if we need to go in a new direction,  I've told Max that I'm canceling school (although I plan on still doing stuff, just not calling it "school", at least I'm still smarter than him for a few more years!)

So we built (or rather I built and max played with the parts) a doodle bot from a kit and played with it.  Max came up with a neat idea that the drawing it did was like the universe, or maxs universe anyway.  Although I promise you his Pa has never shot a grizzly bear! (I'm not sure where max gets some of this stuff?)

We still tried the afternoon project of wet paper painting, but I let him use all three colors.  This was a good exercise for him and his ABA therapist to try together.  I think the painting he came up with was quite beautiful.

I am still going to think about oak meadow this weekend and go over the rest of the curriculum.  If there is too much stuff in there that won't work, I may have to rethink our enrollment.

Thursday 9-18-14, Should Flubber Look Like Melted Ice Cream?

Today was a disaster from start to finish.  Oak Meadow wanted butterflies, again.  This time The suggestion was to draw butterflies out of the letter B.  Well I was a little bit smarter this time.  I decided to chuck it out completely and go with some creature creation.  This is something max and I have been doing for awhile, and I figured we would just create creatures that began with the letter B.  I'm pretty happy with what he came up with.  And he managed (with some assistance), a decent B in the corner.  I figure if Oak Meadow wasn't working I might as well salvage things with a preferred activity.

Then came time to make Flubber.  Which I'm pretty sure isn't supposed to look like melted coffee.  So now I have glue in my hair and nothing to show for it.

So after lunch was supposed to be apple picking for oak meadows science segment.  After my fourth try I finally found an orchard that would allow apple picking during the week (one place told me they couldn't allow us to come because they were having a family crisis!).  We show up only to find the only bags they are selling are $25 1/2 bushel bags and don't have any varieties open except Macintosh.  Ugh.  And their orchard is across a busy main road from where you have no cross walk and cars coming around a blind curve.  Fast.  Did I mention max has no sense of danger?  The picking itself was ok, max was more interested in squishing his feet into the rotted apples and jumping over crabgrass than picking much of anything.  (I wonder what it would be like sometimes to have a serene cooperative kid. Heh.). Anyway, by the time we were done, I was hauling my backpack, 1/2 bushel of apples and a human pogo stick five year old across a main road.  Does not make for a happy me.  At least we have apples now.

We made yummy baked apples for dinner, max was such a good help.  But man I was ready for this day to be over.

Weds 9-17-14, The Unity of What Now?

Ever try to explain the ocean to a desert animal?  That's about how I felt trying to explain to max the unity of one concept.  I get it, out of many we are one.  Many leaves, one tree.  Many people, one earth.  Many boogers, one nose?  That one might have gotten his attention.  I think I might as well have been speaking Klingon for all the good my explanations did.  But we read the story and did the drawing, although I don't think max got much out of it.  I'm not sure oak meadow math is gonna work for him.  He's much to concrete in his thinking right now.  Abstracts do not compute.  Still the drawing was good, I had to draw a light circle for the sun for him or he would have colored the whole background blue and would have melted down when yellow turned to green.

We had a fine time playing with tinker toys after this.  We made robots and used them to visit different planets, had a nice teaching moment about gravity and what lower or higher gravity planets would be like.

After lunch was music and movement with a nursery rhyme march.  Had more luck just calling it marching band and great fun was had running around the house in silly hats to kazoos and harmonicas.

Tuesday 9-16-14, Oh My Butterflies! Again!

I am a little worried about the butterfly heavy theme this week.  Normally I get it, butterflies are awesome and most kids love them.  But max is so over butterflies.  We studied them in depth some time ago.  We covered metamorphosis, making butterfly crafts, did a terrarium etc.  so this morning I had scheduled a butterfly poem reading an then we we supposed to find some instruments and say the poem in rhythm and play along with it etc.  Did I mention max is so over butterflies?  So, yeah, it didn't go well.  I finally gave up and moved onto play dough.

I tried to get him interested in making butterflies (and therefore practice B's) in play dough, but he wasn't really interested.  At least I got him doing some play dough work independently.

After lunch was MORE butterfly stuff.  The syllabus suggests making a clothespin butterfly (and says you can make them with wax paper and bits of old crayons).  So I figured why not?  Great fun was had smashing up some broken crayons we had.  However, I wish the oak meadow instructions had been a bit more clear about the use of wax paper and melted crayons for the wings.  All seemed ok when I was ironing, but when it came time to shape them into wings... Well disaster just about covers it.  It is quite possible I'm an idiot for not looking up more detailed instructions (which I did find when it was way too late), because I managed to not only ruin my iron (did you know you shouldn't iron directly on wax paper?  Cause I didn't!). But when I tried to cut the wax wings into something vaguely butterfly shaped, they just broke.  And then didn't fit into the clothespin.  By this time I'm swearing under my breathe and max has completely lost interest.

I sorta managed to salvage some semblance of order by getting max to use the wax pieces in a collage, which of course has to include Mickey Mouse.  We decided to call it a day after that.  I may never be able to use my iron again.

Monday 9-15-14, Bears, elephants and Organs, oh my!

So today we begin the letter B week.  We read Goldilocks and the three bears.  I had to laugh a little but about the Oak Meadow version of Goldilocks, which rather than end the traditional way, had the story continue and them all become fast friends and learn woodworking together and eat mush made from healthy grains and oats.  Snort!  Anyway, we did ok with the B drawing, although I am still encountering resistance to trying to copy anything resembling the drawings in the book.  In this one max decided that pooh bear was the bear to draw.  Eh, whatever floats his boat!

We had OT today, so we only tried health today after lunch.  Hmmm, health this week is very behind us.  For the kindergarten section, they wanted max to name body parts, do a self portrait and talk about how our parts compared with animals.  For anyone who has been reading this you realize we've already followed maxs interested well past this type of discussion.  So I improvised and we went right for the eyewitness books and the internal structures of favorite animals.

We looked at the skeletons of cats and snakes, and how the internal organs of snakes differed from human beings.  Unfortunately thanks to the internet, we kept coming across pictures of snakes being dissected.  Max thought it was hilarious that I thought snake innards were gross.  We settled on making an outline of an elephant instead of max and worked on talking about their skeletal structure and organs.

Not a bad day, we ended with some magna tiles play

Well that was a heck of a thing!

So.  Week one is done.  I took yesterday to completely not think about school, but now it's Sunday and I find myself having to plan out a whole new week.  I think after a few weeks my stamina for this will increase as I get more familiar with everything, but for now I'm still a bit drained.  I plan on getting to a point where I'm a week or two ahead of myself as soon as I can!

Anyway, Thursday was probably the most challenging day of the week.  It was gray and drizzly, and since I hate setting alarms it was the only day this week that we both overslept.  It was just so dark and cozy in the bedroom that I didn't wake up until 10am... Which really threw off our day.  Add to that my planning all our outdoor activities for the day and you can kinda see where this is going.

After morning circle, we had planned all of the large motor running and walking of the letter A outside.  I wasn't sure how that would go, but I brought out some flour as suggested, (max usually loves playing with flour), but today he wanted nothing at all to do with it.  I really couldn't interest him in the running or walking A's at all.  Even trying to set it up as an obstacle course or race track didn't get him into it.  So I went back inside and got some sidewalk chalk, figuring I could at least get him some practice making large motor letters on the ground.  And it worked!  He did really well.  I found the trick was to half complete the letter and make him cross it or make the upside down V shape and let him cross it.  A few of those and we happily drew a path of letters a's down our front walk.  (He's the blue and I'm the orange)

I also tried to get him interested in drawing A's in the dirt, but after half heartedly drawing one A, he wanted to just play with the leaves and stick in our dirt area, so I went with it.  A cute moment occurred when he wanted to make and "plant" a baby tree.  Even though he kinda gets the whole thing about plants coming from seeds, he still kept asking why just putting a stick with leaves tied to
it wouldn't make a new tree.

We went back in and had a little bit of time trying out the beeswax modeling clay oak meadow had suggested as part of their craft kit. Now maybe I'm just not working with this stuff the right way, but man was that stuff frustrating.  It took me so long to warm it up enough to where it could be sorta worked with that by the time we had done that it was time to clean up.  And my hands were seriously
sore.  I don't think this is really a good material for max, he has such a hard time with underdeveloped hand strength that this is really not a medium he can be independent with.

After lunch we tried to talk about the fall seasonal table project.  Unfortunately Max doesn't handle abstract planning very well and since none of the leaves have turned in our area and none of the stores are selling pumpkins yet, this project was kinda flat for him.  After much prompting I managed
to get a short list of  things he thinks of during the fall together.  In an effort to make it more real for him (and since one of the items in his list was ghosts) I tried to make a couple of tissue paper ghosts with him, but when I made the mistake of suggesting he draw the face on his, he had a complete
meltdown.  This was epic.  He even threw himself on the floor and pounded his hands and feet.  Thankfully his ABA therapists have given me some good techniques for dealing with this and after about 10 minutes he had calmed down enough to draw the face with assistance.  Not wanting the
ghosts to be a bad experience for him, I managed to salvage things a bit by getting a good game of fly around the room going with them.

Last but not least we had some great creative play time making an obstacle course for his kittens to go through out of his foam building blocks.  It had a jet plane and everything!

Friday was a bit better, but still thrown off a bit with our schedule because his ABA therapist comes to our house in the afternoon and we had spent a little too much time on our morning project.  Instead of doing puzzles again, max had been on me all Thursday night to finish drawing and writing his
most recent book.  (I think I've mentioned before that making homemade books is his favorite thing in the universe).  He's on a big Minnie and Mickey Mouse kick right and had written this fairly elaborate story about a Christmas party, that at least makes sense to him!

After the book I tried some music and broke out our scarves and ribbon wands, hoping to get us moving after sitting and drawing for so long.  However I made the mistake of turning on some music he has never heard before that had kinda an African beat to it.  By the second song he was holding his
ears and yelling for me to turn it off.  Oh well.  It's so hard sometimes for him to try new things with such a pronounced auditory sensory issue.  Sometimes I forget that.

Anyway, we had a lovely rest of the day.  His therapist helped by working side by side with him on his summer drawing... And he did wonderfully!!!!  I am so proud of him, it actually looks representational.  I can't tell you how huge that is for him!  Next week, we will try me being the side by side drawer with the therapists help and see how that goes.

We ended the day by playing zoo with blocks.

Whew.  I'm not sure if I can keep up with daily blow by blow posts.  I thin maybe I try for a highlights reel next week!

Day 3!

Ok, loving the week so far, but holy crap am I exhausted!  Hats off to teachers who do this all day for huge amounts of kids!  Anyway, day three went well too, although I am discovering some initial resistance to our activities that I'm having to get over creatively.

Today was letter bread baking day, which was greeted by a loud declaration of "I don't wanna make bread!".. But I found that something as simple as starting to lay out the ingredients and letting him choose which spatula he wanted to use got him interested enough to come to the table, and we managed from there.  Strangely enough the highlight of maxs day today was during bread making, when he put a finger full of raw molasses into his mouth.  I don't think he was prepared for the strong flavor and the look on his face was priceless.  I gave him a finger full of honey as "antidote", and he's been talking about it all day.  Also, the assignment was to make letter A bread, but for max it was impossible to make A's without also making a B C and D.  So we had alphabet letters for lunch.  It was delicious.

I should note that while the bread was rising we recited the letter A tongue twister.  It didn't even occur to me that max had no idea what a tongue twister was... He was very curious about it, but I think he was a little disappointed that it didn't have to do with actually twisting your tongue!  We also did a marble run.  Hehehe, the marble run somehow evolved into max feeding the marbles as food to a digestive system and then it would "poop" them out... He even made me get a dish of water for the "potty".  Gotta love boys.

After lunch was the make the letter a's from sticks assignment.  When I suggested to max the idea of taking sticks to make letters he looked at me like I had three heads.  But he couldn't stand it when I left the A's only partially done, and he had to complete them.  In the end we made them out of sticks rocks and pine needles from his nature box.

We ended up keeping his nature box out for a bit so he could make a dinosaur skeleton.

After that was rice bin play, which he loved!

Day 2!

Whew!  Made it through day 2.  Morning circle still going well.  I really think I had been overdoing it before with my elaborate morning circle.  By the time we were done we were both so burned out that it was heard to transition into the next activity.  Max still won't sing the songs, but I've heard him humming a bit in the background.  I think maybe I will get some shaker eggs or something so he can participate more.

The white board schedule is working well.  Now that he is able to read most of the words it is easy for us to refer to and keeps us on task.

So then came puzzles and mazes for the math.  Heh.  I think I need a better strategy for puzzles.  It has been a long time since we've done puzzles together, and when I brought out his puzzle bin I was
greeted with"oh no, not puzzles again!".  Not a great start.  He wanted to play with the pieces,
combine multiple puzzles together and make his own pictures with them.  Normally I encourage this sort of outside the box thinking, but I really wanted him to put it together the right way.  By the end of it we were both miserable.  He ended up talking me into making and cutting out a custom Mickey  mouse puzzle, which was great until we discovered it really was too thin and wouldn't go back together after it had been cut out.

Anyway, I finally just put a pin in the whole puzzles idea and moved onto mazes.  Which turned out to be great fun.  We got a kick out of making our own mazes, with max at the beginning being chased by a monster, having to get home to mommy.  The mazes are very simplistic, I've seen him do more complicated ones, but I really wanted him to practice staying on the path... To add a little extra thrill, we used his wiggle pen, which vibrates like crazy in his hand and makes it more interesting for him.  I also drew extra monsters outside the borders that he had to avoid.

After lunch we played dress up, which was lots of fun.  Max has been reading shel Silverstein poems, and his favorite is called Backward Bill, in which a guy does everything backwards, including putting on his clothes.  So ewe had great fun finding absurd ways to put clothes on.

Next for the afternoon was health.  Which was looking at baby pictures and talking about what human beings need at different life stages and how they grow.  Getting max to look at pictures and videos of himself is never a problem.  So a blissful hour was spent sitting on the couch and watching videos.  It was a nice stroll down memory lane and max had lots of questions about himself growing up.   What was coolest to note was the interest he took in how our house has changed over the last five years.  New furniture, changes made in his playroom etc.

Last for the day was playing with clay.  Heh.  The photo I took was only a few minutes in.  I really should have taken an after photo, it was the biggest mess I have ever seen him make (which translates into that he had a fantastic time).  But it seriously took me 1/2 hour to scrub the clay up off the ma the was using.  I know flour based clay is best for kids and the environment.. But seriously folks, I found out today why they also use it for glue!

First day of kindergarten!

So today was the first day of kindergarten using our new oak meadow curriculum, and it went well. Better than I had hoped in fact. We slept a little later than I had intended, but still did everything we needed to before OT.

 Basically, we had our morning circle, and instead of lighting a candle I used our Tibetan singing bowl to "ring in" the start. We said our opening verse and sang some songs from our hootenanny book, or rather *I* sang them and max dance and leaped around the room.  Then we rang the bell again.  I think I like this new short version of morning circle rather than the one I had been doing.  Short and sweet, without enough time for him to loose focus.

Then we went over our white board of today's schedule.  This isn't an oak meadow thing, but it's
become necessary to write and check off our tasks for the day.. The fewer surprises for max the easier it is to get him from A to B.

Last night we had read Peter Rabbit, and this morning we read it again, and I explained to him that we would be talking about the letter A and doing a picture of a gate and a letter A as shown in the beginning of the story.  I think he's retaining the story pretty well, although he's not really able to repeat back to me the sequence of events, he is asking questions about why Peter lost his shoes and jacket, why the cat wouldn't help Peter and saying how much he liked Peter hiding in the watering can.  He was very concerned about Peter feeling tired and wet.  And I actually got him to draw.  It doesn't look anything like the gate with the big red letter A, but just that I got him to use those beeswax crayons of his own accord is a HUGE win.  He talked about the drawing while he was doing it, and while it doesn't really look like anything, he drew peter rabbit with his blue jacket and buttons,
 the gate next to him (with a letter A in the same color right on top of it). He then added a rainbow
and grass and sky.  I was so proud!

We then had some free play time before OT, in which we played Legos together.

After lunch, we had scheduled our afternoon activity to be music and movement.  The oak meadow syllabus suggested a few rounds of head shoulders knees and toes.  Max sometimes likes this and sometimes doesn't.  I can interest him sometimes in naming other body parts instead to touch... But today for some reason he was super interested in ballet again.  So I went with it.  I have an
instructional ballet lesson for kids that I purchased from amazon.  We sort of half followed that and half made up our own and leaped around the room.  Man am I out of shape. Heh.

Anyway, once we were done with that, we went back into the playroom for creative play.  I brought
out his blocks and he built a replica of a racetrack and grandstand.

Then we recreated radiator springs in alphabet blocks and put all the cars in their respective houses.

Strangely enough, max has been really interested in the difference between outlined cartoon drawings and ones that look more realistic like when things are 3D animated in movies and TV these days.  So this all led to a discussion about whether or not you could draw lightening McQueen without using outlines.  I did this illustration to try and show him the difference between drawing outlined and not.  I hope this will help with later oak meadow drawings.

Anyway, I think things went really well today.  Now we are relaxing.  Here's hoping for tomorrow!

Once more down the rabbit hole!

Starting kindergarten tomorrow using the Oak Meadow curriculum. I am nervous and trying to prep down to every last detail. But I also have enough experience now to realize that no matter how much you prep it will go how it will go. Here's hoping that we hit our stride this week and I can keep max interested in the projects! I will be Updating again soon!