See! Steve Demme has wonderful suggestions for teaching special needs kids that
will bleed into other areas of schooling.
Explode the Code for reading development. It’s very repetitive with short
lessons that are easy to teach.
As for the rest, we did a Charlotte
Mason approach. We already had Bible
stories on hand. For preparation I would
read a Bible story and pick out one
sentence, or even just a word, and on a
piece of plain notebook paper I would
write it in highlighter. Afterwards I
would read the story with them and
make them read the sentence in the
notebook, as well as trace the highlighted letters. Their handwriting was
terrible at the beginning of the year, so
I got handwriting paper with raised
lines, and I would make highlighted
letters for them to trace. We even did
cursive that way, and they actually
caught on to that pretty well! Watching
a movie that goes along with the story
you’re reading is good, because it gets
the information in all the different
learning avenues.
We had quite a bit of success; we went
from me reading to them and copying all
the sentences (this time last year) to them
currently reading The Early Reader’s
Bible story alone. They pick their own
sentences to copy. This year, I plan on
getting them a higher level of Bible to
read along with GrapeVine Studies.
(The people at GrapeVine are wonderful
and so excited about their product!) I’m
also going to try Handwriting Without
Tears. (Copying all those highlighted
letters was cheaper, but a lot of work!)
For language I want to try Wordly Wise.
Looking for a way to increase their social
abilities, I ran into Art of Eloquence in
TOS magazine. JoJo is so nice; she
handled my order personally and gave me
some great advice.
—Vienna
Do you have a question for our
readers? Email emarlowe@The
HomeschoolMagazine.com. Elisabeth
Marlowe is the editor of our Minute to
Minute E-Newsletter.
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Teachers’ Lounge ; Summer 2010 33
