I missed a weekly update because--so sick. So very sick. Cai came down with gastro at a borthday party, and we followed, and then I followed with health issues of our own. For a while our house was its own circle of Hell.
So, what, apart from the time lost to illness, have we been up to?
Cai's birthday girl friend loves games too, so that's been a big thing. He played games with her that I would have thought were far too challenging for such little kids--she's just turned four!--and seeing them play Rory's Story Cubes and make up stories was a revelation. They had story races, seeing who could make up a story first!
I went a little crazy at the Kidstuff 20% off sale--Cai has a birthday soon!--and put most of it away for later. Seriously, with an unlimited budget I would fill several houses with stuff from there.
The one thing I did bring out immeditely was Penguins on Ice, some maths manipulatives that have been a big hit. I really like them. There are ten bars of "ice" and 10 rubbery, solid penguins of each of ten colours. The bars snap together horizontally or vertically.
At first Cai just happily sorted them for ages. He also made up his own games. I've also made up games using a ten sided die with them for sorting, subetizing and place value, which have been big hits.
I was particularly pleased with how quickly Cai took to place value--once I taught him "a trick for counting fast" he wanted to use it to do it every turn, and for me to write down the numbers.
I have plans to use the penguins as a resource for number line addition and subtraction and for multiplication, but I will find and adapt or make up those games later. It's also, I think, a really good (and cute) way to build a foundation for arithmetic abacus/sokoban skills that I want to introduce later on. And the Base 10 set I bought in a rush of enthusiasm when he was three. :D
We just have to be really, really careful not to lose penguins, which may be a challenge.
We also introduced UNO, which has been a massive hit. Almost too massive. Played other card games, too.
Lots and lots of reading, especially math and science books. Concentrating on the concepts of place value, skip counting, fractions and number bonds in book choices. Reinforcing the concepts while cooking. Geography books, especially about the US (his mecca). And his other mummy made a huge hit with a book about microbes, which has led to constant questions ever since.
Cai really, really takes to maths. When I reached the hot stove part of cooking the other night, the part he can't help with, he pulled out a list of addition number facts and read it to me, with exclamations of excitement and cheers. It's so cute. He really is a unique child in some ways.
My big failure of the fortnight is something I need to try again.
I was reading a book of maths games. Many of them mentioned using Numicon to teach number bonds.
Well, Numicon is expensive, and Cai loves Pokemon, so I designed a set using Numicon colours and shapes but using pokemon instead of plain colours, and designed a pokemon hunting set to go with it. This was right before I got sick.
Yesterday, I got my printouts, laminated and half killed my hands making the card pieces for the game while Cai played. (How much do I now appreciate all the work my mother did as a junior primary teacher, and in her own time?) He came across just as I was cutting up the final few, and had a complete hysterical meltdown at me "ruining" the Pokemon by cutting them up. NOT the reaction I was hoping for.
They've been set aside for a bit, and I'm hoping to bring them out and actually try the game later on... Bit of a disappointment for now.
The other big things have been finishing his game development badge by making levels in several games, and his decision to be a YouTube Let's Player, which I've been working hard on fulfilling. No usable videos as yet, but I think this is a good learning experience for him. Lots of learning for me, too... He's helped me design channel graphics, and we're getting there.
I know not to let him read the comments when he does. Ethangamer, for example, the little cutie, has comments saying they want to punch him in the mouth. I have no idea what would lead adults to comment like that on a kid's video. It's vile
I still worry too much about Cai's writing, but he's actually done some colouring (!) and I know I'm being silly. He'll get there at his own pace. He' not even five. He's playing with blocks and lego and playdough and these are all important prewriting skills, getting his fine motor skills better so he'll be able to manipulate pens and pencils. Might do some clay work with him today.
His colouring is very below his age level, but his sensory issues mean I am ecstatic he did any at all. Maybe I can convince one of his friends to colour with him and get some peer pressure going. ;)
Apart from illness, life is great in our little homeschool. This week, I look forward to more social and outdoors play, getting his Youtube channel going, and trying out some science activities in another book we found at the library.
Child-led pace
Due to the holidays and a nasty cycle of insomnia and migraine, I've been slacking off on weekly reports.
Example relaxed homeschooling day, yesterday:
We "slept in" late, as it was Izzy's first day back at work after the holidays and Cai was clingy. We played with his baby doll, Cai initiating toothbrushing, feeding, giving him water and talking about teeth: how they grow, how they decay, how adult teeth push out milk teeth. This is an issue that gives him a lot of anxiety, and I've noticed he uses his baby doll a lot to work through anxieties.
Side note: Cai announced the other day that his baby doll is mostly a boy (called Baby) but is a girl when called Izzy after his other mummy. "That means he's an insect."
It took us a few moments to realise he was trying to say "intersex." :D
Oh, well, that's one educational goal down. Our child, before five, has a better concept of human biological sex being a non-binary continuum than a lot of adults. Score one for a pro-science kindergarten education.
We also did a lot of wordplay in bed, something Cai loves. I remember reading somewhere that it's an ASD trait. Whatever it is, he loves combining and inventing new words.
We also played Fight List. Obviously Cai is as useless at categories like Justin Bieber songs as I am, but in some categories--reptiles, for example, or symbols of Christmas--he comes up with answers faster than I can Swype them. Fight List has become a daily routine.
Once we got up, Cai played with Lego a lot, which I love because it works on his fine motor skills, and did a lot of pretend play.
When I suggested "Let's do some homeschool work!" Cai elected to do workbooks yesterday,, and ran eagerly to the table. In practice it didn't go very well, perhaps due to my headache and general exhaustion, but we finished off the Learning Addition workbook--way too easy for him, but I liked finishing--and did some Thinking Skills work.
The only real success from that was that he liked using coins to measure the height of clowns--which matches with an Australian Curriculum goal, measurement using everyday objects, so yay. He also liked to put them on the clowns' buttons, and cover clowns completely, and count them. This is a general thing: Cai doesn't tend to stay on task. He chases rabbit trails. He answers things differently--in the same session, questions about words starting with the same sound, he delighted in answering "wrong" but by twisting the word--"Frog" matches "frelephant", for example. These are things that are great in a one on one context, but would be disruptive in a class, which is one of the reasons I think homeschooling suits him.
He also never stays still while working. He gets up, bounces around, moves. He "answers" by spinning a mini fidget spinner on an answer. All things that are probably helpful in a kinetic learner, but would be a major pain in a classroom.
He also struggled with writing answers. When he had to trace out letters, he insisted on using two hands, or didn't press hard enough to make marks, and resisted correct grip. He defaulted quickly to ignoring the shapes and making circles, which are easier for him. So this remains something we need to work on.
So now I list it, we got more out of the workbooks than I thought. Nonetheless, he got sick of it soon, so I suggested playdough, thinking of the fine motor skills lacking in his attempts at writing. We made it together, Cai assisting with measuring, and we played with that instead.
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| Vax game in progress |
This turned out to be the perfect example of serendipity in relaxed homeschooling. Cai was fascinated by the process of preventing the spread of disease through using vaccination to isolate disease carriers from the herd, and the way "grey" (unvaccinated) people could be protected by other people being vaccinated.
Now, Cai is rarely sick. He saw a paediatrician and occupational therapist for a while because of his low height and weight and autistic and sensory issues, but he sees GPs as terrifying places that stick needles in him for no reason. "To prevent you getting sick" has no weight with him, maybe because he doesn't have much memory of being sick.
But this game really resonated with him. We looked at the people who were protected, and the orange vaccine refusers who make it harder. We talked about people who aren't vaccinated--tiny babies, for example--and how they are protected by being isolated off from potential disease carriers by vaccination. We talked about the diseases his mummies and our parents got before there were needles for them, I showed him my chickenpox scars, and we looked at googled pictures of chickenpox, measles and mumps, and I talked to him about how scary it must have been for my parents.
He looked at the circles in the game that were larger because they link to most people and can spread disease faster, so are vital to be vaccinated, and he brainstormed people they could be, being proud of himself for thinking of childcare workers.
He was really, really into the idea of protecting babies from getting sick. Cai loves babies. He really got the concepts of herd immunity, cushioning and social responsibility. He went from hating the idea of needles to stabbing his finger at the screen saying "everyone gets needles!"He finally accepts that, yes, flu vax will happen every year. Frankly, he now understands the concept of vaccination as a social responsibility better than many grownups.
We also had productive conversations about vaccine refusal and their reasons. I avoided the MMR autism myth as yet, because there is too much autism phobia and shaming for me to want to approach it with my own ASD kid just yet.
We did talk about how people don't remember epidemics and just how bad and dangerous they were, because they've been protected so long, and a little about relative toxicity (not in those words) and how people don't always understand it, and that people don't always understand how the digestive, renal and circulatory (not in so many words) systems work so they think that eating something (formaldehyde) in an apple or steak is safe but much tinier amounts are dangerous when injected.
He's wanted to talk about it this morning, too, and why my being sick is different and people can't catch it, so I can predict a lot of little rabbit trails into biology and social studies from here. And this is what I love best about homeschooling: rabbit trails.
I foresee a Pokemon badge with Bissey holding a syringe in his future...
Anyway, this was a day in which I had low energy due to pain, we didn't leave the house, and I didn't think Cai had learned much: until I started to think about it. It was a day in which, frankly, I played a lot of Love, Nikki and Cook, Serve, Delicious--and that's another thing, Cai initiated creating a "healthy" menu for the game and picking out balanced and healthy foods. More incidental, child-led learning.
I may not be a radical unschooler, but I am very, very grateful to them for teaching me to "see the learning" and understand that education need not come from traditional sources. I mean, as I type this, Cai is watching a video on the life cycle of rattlesnakes that he found for himself on Youtube.
Other catch up things:
There have been lots and lots of board games, rarely missing a day.
Thanks to his Australian Nanna and Poppa, we added Pop to the Shops to our board game lineup. Cai loves anything shopping themed, and Pop to the Shops is excellent for numeracy because it involves paying for purchases, giving change and figuring out if you have enough if you draw an expensive item--bearing in mind that you "get paid" in the centre. Really lovely game.
I've been really pleased to see Australian Poppa get into the idea of incidental learning, teaching Cai about things like water safety flags and channels in the harbour. It's awesome.
Social skills: lots of incidental playing with other kids, family celebrations over the holidays, and something I was really particularly pleased with: picking out presents for family members that he thought they'd like, and taking into account their feelings and tastes. He saw Poppa playing with my fidget cube, so Poppa got a fidget cube. Izzy mummy got a necklace in her favourite colour. I got perfume, and he was very serious about smelling samples (bless the kind and indulgent Chemist Warehouse perfume counter lady!) Australian Nanna got a candle in peppermint "for Christmas".
Cai is also interested in learning card games now. We've started simple, with things like Snap and Fish, to teach him procedures.
Speaking of games, I joined a Facebook community called Gameschoolers which looks at using (mostly board) games for educational purposes. They run the gamut from school-at-homers who allow strictly limited screen time and only educational board games to radical unschoolers, with lots of eclectic homeschoolers in between. Nonetheless, they are my tribe, I think. I'm particularly intrigued by those who see themselves as using a purely game and experiment based curriculum.
Personally, I've been letting my own goals drift a bit, and I need to get on track. Every health and social professional I've seen reminds me that I am not just a mother and it's best for Cai if I pursue my own things as well. So I want to get back on track with my writing career, toy making (which I have already revived) and Japanese learning in particular. And get back in contact with a couple of old friends.
Speaking of looking after myself, I still have post-migraine malaise, but I have a prescription to fill today, and I really want to get Cai out of the house and playing with other kids, so I need to go out. I have a lot of housework to catch up on, too, and some shopping to get done by tomorrow, as Cai has a play-date with two little friends.
So time to stop analysing and start living!
Yesterday was mostly about socialisation.
Cai has high functioning ASD, and until recently showed little interest in making friends. He would play happily and patiently with--or beside--other kids, share and take turns nicely then would walk away without saying goodbye or acknowledging them. I worried about him, and rejoiced at any sign of socialising, but I was beginning to accept that he just wasn't wired for it. Any encouragement by wider family to "make friends" would be met by him placidly saying "Some people don't have friends. It's okay."
Other the last few weeks, however, things have started to change. We spent some weeks in the UK, and Cai spent a lot of time playing with his English younger cousins. For the first time, he became really attached. When we came back, he started really playing with other kids in playgrounds and playgroup, actively interacting with them. It was a huge difference.
So yesterday was a playdate with a new friend of mine with a little girl. It was fantastic. Cai and Lilith played and played, hugged and kissed, shared everything, giggled their heads off, and cried when they had to part. We have many play dates planned in the future!
Seriously, seeing our autistic son make a friend like that was a miracle.
Cai also, at his own request, spent Wednesday morning in a casual session at daycare, something we haven't done for a long time. The last few times were disasters and he had to be rescued. This time, it went brilliantly, I had a few hours to write, and when I came to collect him he was joining in on a group game and giggling.
His paediatrician on Monday mentioned he seemed like an entirely different child to six months before, and asked what our magic wand was. Really, it's come down to letting him set the pace and not letting ourselves get pushed into stressing him out "because he has to learn". Cai knows when he's ready.
I'm excited--and a little apprehensive--about stepping up the socialisation side of his life. But it's something we always planned. Part of our reason for homeschooling is replacing the intense, peer pressured, artificial school environment with the chance to interact with and make friends with people of all ages and interests.
Picture credit: mcconnmama