CHOOSING HOME SCHOOL

So many of you are probably thinking why did we choose a state funded homeschooling program rather than a traditional homeschooling program?  Others are probably answering this question by saying that cost was surely the deciding point. COST had nothing to do with it.  Let me teach you something that many home schoolers probably are not aware of and likely do not need to worry about.


When you home school your children, YOU are responsible for their educational growth. At no point will the public system ever be required to be responsible for their educational growth.  Not even when the day comes that you are no longer able to home school your child because of work or other demands.  So what happens when that day comes?  You take your child to your district office and they administer a test for the child to enter their school.  If at that time the child is 12 years old and testing at the 2nd grade level instead of the 6th grade level, they will enter school as a 12 year old in 2nd grade.  (So if you have been in our shoes at any point, you probably already know where I am going with this.) For most families this is no problem, because if there is nothing wrong with the child, they will soak in what ever you are teaching them better than they would in a public system.  However, for a child with disabilities, it takes lots of effort and/or different teaching styles to learn.  If they are not taught for their needs then very likely they are going to test below level for their age.  So despite the fact that you may have started to home school them when they were already behind, they will still enter school at what ever grade they test in at.  Do you see the danger of traditional homeschooling for children with learning disabilities?  


In the state system the parent is the primary teacher for the child, though they are to assigned a teacher.  The teachers are only as involved as the parent would like them to be.  The state is still responsible for the child's growth and it is just as if the child were attending a public school. Children are not required to test into their grade if they ever return to their traditional District.  


The thought of homeschooling without the state program was scary for us.  We wanted to make sure that we were prepared for any event.  If  I ever had to go back to work or if our family experienced a difficulty of any kind, then our kids would take the loss.  We did not want to risk our children ever having to test into school and land in a grade not appropriate for their age. It was not worth it to us to take the gamble.

WHERE WE STAND

It has now been nearly 6 months since my last post and there has been some dramatic changes in our family life.  I have been feeling for a long time that I need to stop my posts which review the Book 'Teaching Mathematics to Deaf Children' and resume at a later time.  I feel that my energy will be best spent, on your behalf, if I focus my energy for a while on my experiences in dealing with the school system for my children.  These posts are going to be beneficial and quite helpful for any parent of a child with disabilities of any kind; Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Hearing impairment, Developmental Apraxia of Speech or Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Cerebral Palsy, etc, etc, etc. . .


So, as I said, and as many of you have probably noticed, it has been nearly 6 months since my last post.  WHY? Well quite simply I had the opportunity to put my children in a state funded homeschooling program and we took the plunge with both of my school aged children.  It takes quite the energy, organization, and time.  Though, I will tell you, it was the best decision we have ever made for our children.

CONCLUSIONS: COUNTING AND SIMPLE MATH

Research shows:


1) Hearing Impaired preschoolers are just as competent at some of the informal mathematical tasks as hearing preschoolers


2) When presented spatially, hearing impaired preschoolers are actually better than the hearing peers in presenting the right number of objects in an array


3) Teachers of Hearing Impaired preschoolers need to give them more opportunities to practice counting than would normally be offered to hearing peers.


4) It is very likely that Hearing impaired children start to fall behind simply from a lack of experience in counting. 


5) Current work on teaching Hearing Impaired children focuses on what informal mathematical methods hearing children invent and if the hearing impaired can do the same rather than on what informal mathematical methods the hearing impaired invent 


(recap of chapter 2; Nunes)

SIMPLE ADDITION; ADDING ON USING SIGN LANGUAGE

When learning simple addition, typical hearing children use their fingers in order to facilitate 'adding on'.  Say we have the problem 5 + 4, the hearing child will put up four fingers to help them add on from 5 to get their answer of nine.  However, a hearing impaired child being taught in sign language, is left at a disadvantage.  They use their hands to 'say' their numbers and therefore do not have fingers to count with.  In observing these children, Groen and Resnick found that some of these children 'invented' their own method of 'adding on' using sign language.  In the same problem 5 + 4 the child would start with a signed 5 on one hand and the sign for 4 on the other hand.  The hand with 5 would increase in increments of 1 while the hand with the 4 signed on it would decrease by increments of 1, until the hand that originally displayed a 4 signed a 0; then the child would know he had his answer on the hand that once displayed 5.

While my children (and many other hearing impaired children) do not use sign language, I felt I needed to document this observation in this blog, because methods for teaching hearing impaired children are not well known or researched.  My intentions of this section of the blog is to bring to light methods that work in teaching math to the hearing impaired children; in order to make education easier for them and help those who teach them know how to help them.

(called the signed algorithm found on page 41 of Teaching Mathematics to Deaf Children by Nunes)

VISUAL COUNTING - WHAT WORKS

I feel that it is very appropriate at this time to include the observations I have made with teaching counting to my children. However, as you read this, keep in mind that our children did not have hearing aids in their first years of school.  So while they have only mild impairments, they will not have the same outcome as other mildly impaired children who had hearing aids.  You may also consider that many severely/profoundly deaf children when aided will have hearing scores measuring on the low side of mild.  As a result, I believe that it is highly likely, my children's abilities in school reflect this population.

Alex was really our 'guinea pig'.  We sent him to school his first year of kindergarten and just expected that he was going to learn.  What was I thinking?!  So at the end of his first year of kindergarten he was counting to 3, despite being in the classroom counting to 100 with his peers everyday from day one til the end.  He was held back; I worked with him diligently over the summer and he was counting to 4 at the beginning of his second year of kindergarten.  At the end of that year, he was counting solidly to 9. I had begun to try to figure out better methods of teaching him how to count and found the most effective way was to have a number chart in front of him and have him count while looking at the numbers in front of him.  At the end of first grade he was counting to 29.  But he was saying fiveteen for fifteen.  As he started 2nd grade, he had a new teacher who required him to say 'fifteen', despite his speech impairment.  This was enough of a change to make his emerging abilities fall apart.  The counting string was no longer natural for him; he had to  think about what he was saying and began making mistakes at 13.  It should also be noted, because of the change in pronunciation, he was now saying 'itee' for 13,15,16.  So many times he would be on 13 and then jump to 17 OR 16 and go back to 14.  The US Department of Education Office of SPED states on their website, studentprogress.org that mistakes in pronunciation due to a speech impairment should be accepted.

Diego is a different story.  Much of what I needed to know I learned through Alex, so with Diego I started to count with him a year before he started kindergarten.  We started in the little preschool books which had a set of objects to count and then a set of lines to write that number on several times. We went up to 15 in those books, then I started to make worksheets with objects to be counted on them starting at 15 and each week adding more objects to the amount, to progressively work him up to 30.  He was counting up to 20 then I had Levi and stopped for about 8 weeks.  He dropped down to 14, and it took him about 2 months to recoup the numbers back up to 20 again.  So he started school counting to 20.  When he started school, I kept counting with him for the first few months, but when we put our house up for sale, I had to keep teaching supplies hidden and I could not maintain consistency (because they were not out to remind me).  With only the help he was receiving from daily counting as a class in school, he was only counting to 14 again at Christmas break.

I have found the most important tools to help my children have been:

1) The use of personally created worksheets that gradually increase the demand of counting

2) Using a 100's chart to have the children point to each number as they count

3) Counting along with them, but only saying the numbers that they miss.  I found it very important for me to anticipate the numbers I knew they would miss, so that there was no breakdown in continuity.  Eventually they pick up the numbers that you are saying for them, which extends their counting ability.
4) Please note, that corrections of pronunciation should not be made unless you know the child is capable of pronouncing it better.  They will self correct their pronunciations as they become more aware of the counting string.  If not, you can always correct the pronunciation (if it bothers you) once there skills are nearly mastered.

5) Daily practice with attention to detail is a requirement.