Do any of you with kids in the lower grades test your kids? I wasn’t going to when I started, but I am testing Tim all week anyway. I wanted to have something besides his work, to have in one place, that gave a sample of all our state requires him to know. He took the language arts test today, he’s doing math tomorrow, science on Wednesday, and social studies on Thursday. He only missed two answers out of 77 on the language arts, I was so jazzed! That’s the subject that he’s come the farthest in this year. When we started he didn’t even know all the names of the letters, much less the sounds they made. I had planned on reviewing for the rest of the year, but he really can’t stand repeating things, and I knew he had retained most of what we taught, so why drag it out? This way, if there’s some things that he doesn’t really remember, we can work on those for the last few weeks.

I also revised our school calendar. I originally had his last day of school in the middle of July, with only about two weeks off before starting 1st grade. But I decided to end on May 30, and then we’ll just use T4L and some of the other online sites we like to keep him on a schedule. It just won’t be anything I have to record or worry about, which will give me time to write up the lesson plan for next year. If I have something down on paper, I am terrible about thinking that I have to stick to it. So, changing our last day of school will take pressure off of both of us!

I decided to interview Mr. Tim about his use of a program called Time4Learning, to find out what makes it so special. Tim is a kindergartner in CA, but he uses this program to help him with 1st grade language arts and math, and 2nd grade social studies and science. His little brother uses it, too, but was unavailable for comment. Here’s the interview we conducted on April 15, 2008. Read for yourself, and decide if this program is all it’s cracked up to be!

AL- Mr. Lindsay, what would you say is your favorite thing about this Time4Learning?

MT- I like the funny people and animals on there.

AL- Is there anything that you don’t like about, anything that bothers you?

MT- I don’t like waiting for them to shut up when they tell me how to do something and I already know how to do it. They don’t let me go forward and do it, they just keep talking and talking.

AL- Do you have a favorite funny person or animal on there?

MT- I like that ruler guy, the one on the math.

AL- What is your favorite thing to learn about on T4L?

MT- I like science best, it’s fun!

That concludes this portion of our interview, Mr. Tim had a favorite program to watch and he wasn’t happy about the interruption.

Do your kids have problems with repetition? Tim cannot stand to repeat a lesson, or even an idea. We studied about seasons at the beginning of the month. This last quarter I’m reviewing everything he learned through the year, and this week for science it’s seasons. I had him watch a video on seasons, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘why do we have to do this, we already learned about it’. UGH! Even after several months he remembered going over it, and he was grumpy through the whole thing. He doesn’t understand why he has to practice adding and subtracting every day, or why he has to write/read every day. To him, he knows it, so let’s move on!

We’re having to revise our schedule once again. I normally have him start school whenever we get up and really moving, which is around 10am, then we go for a walk outside before the schooled kids get off the bus. But lately, he’s been starting later and taking longer, so he’s having to miss out on the walks, which he really loves. So, we’re now going to try doing chores first, then the walk, and then start school. It really depends on if he fights me to do school after he’s had fun, whether or not this is how we’ll keep it.

In most areas, Tim is far ahead of where he should be, I do believe he’s gifted. But one area that has been a struggle has been letters, sounds, and putting it all together. It’s not that he can’t do it, but he has memory problems in this area. He is extremely sensitive, and if he feels like he isn’t doing good he gets extremely frustrated and this can bring on a meltdown, it pushes his sensory issues into overload. He can learn the letter names and sounds, but if we give it a break for even a week, we’re in trouble! And, if he’s struggling to learn something else, the letters and sounds take a back seat every time, he just can’t focus on two things at the same time. What’s strange, is on T4L, he’s doing 1st grade for language arts and is reading! It takes A LOT of effort, he hates sounding out the words. We do this with readers, too. He also has a hard time with middle sounds. He can tell me the beginning and end, and can find them on the T4L lessons,  but the middle is harder for him. On there, they sound out each sound, and he can do that, but if I say ‘cat’ without emphasizing the middle sound, he misses it. Is that age appropriate? I’m not sure, so I don’t know if I should make a big deal out of it or not.

I started realizing that his memory is much better for memorizing whole words than the sounds, but not in terms of remembering them from one day to the next. He can do that, but only if we use the word A LOT. If we’re reading a reader and I help him with a word, he’ll remember that word through the whole thing. Our readers have about 15 words used over and over again in the stories. So, yesterday I tried something with him. I took some three-letter word flash cards. I held on up and we named the letters, said the sounds together, and said the whole word. Then, I removed the flash card and had him try to write them. He did six words, and got them all right, perfectly, without any help. He wasn’t sounding them out, but he was memorizing the names of the letters and writing them. Is this a sign of a photographic memory, or is it that I’m confusing him by mixing the names of the letters with the sounds? It might be that I don’t need to worry about the sounds, just the letter names and work on whole words? That is so foreign to me, though, and I’m not sure how to teach whole word vs. phonics. I taught myself to read phonetically before I was even in kindergarten, so I just can’t comprehend how he can learn to read without understanding phonics. Any ideas??

It could also be that things are finally just clicking for him, the combination of the letter sounds and names (he’s just now able to tell me what sounds the letters make when I ask him, for most of the letters) and if I change what I’m doing, it might confuse him more. I’m just not sure what direction to go. I do know that I’m going to keep using the flash card idea, because he was having so much fun with that! No stress in his face at all. Up until now when he’s writing I’ve been writing the work and having him just copy it. Then, a few weeks ago, I started saying words and having him spell them by sounding them out. He did pretty good with this, but there was still some stress there. He flips out of he gets something wrong, so he only wants to do what he knows. Makes it hard to try to get him to branch out! And, most kids learn to write by spelling words wrong, don’t they? I’ve heard that before. Like, tough would be spelled tuff, cute would be kute, etc. He stresses so much, I’m afraid to not help him spell words because if he makes a mistake he won’t want to try again. Yet, if I focus on teaching him to spell perfectly, isn’t that telling him he has to be perfect?? UGH! So many questions today! I just don’t want to screw up and turn him off of learning. I know that it can be a fine line with kids with autism and kids who are gifted, so for a kid who is both, it makes this journey really unnerving sometimes. I guess I want a manual to tell me exactly how to teach him the way HE needs to learn. Ha!

We go year round in the truest sense. We go from the first week of August until the second week of July, with a week off for Christmas, one for Easter, and a day off for holidays and birthdays that are important to us. Tim just cannot handle not having his routine, so I’m not even sure if I’m going to stop completely for those two weeks between the end of kindergarten and the beginning of 1st grade.

We finished our 3rd quarter yesterday, which is why I forgot to post on here, it was busy making sure I had paperwork in order. I printed his report card (he just gets S, S-, S+ grades) and printed out his attendance, and looked over what we are doing for the 4th quarter. We only have two more weeks of new material, and the rest is all review from the whole year, which means a really relaxed, easy last quarter. I’ll use T4L and a few other sites for the reviewing, and the rest will be worksheets and verbal review. He loves webcams, so we’ll use those again to review animals.

Our state requires 180 days for school. Right now he’s completed 151, so he only needs 29 more to go, but I have 71 scheduled. I like going over, so we can take a day off here and there as we want to and not have to worry about it. This was my test run to make sure I had everything figured out so next year, when he’s officially a homeschooled student (he’ll be six, compulsory age, in July) I’ll know exactly what I’m doing for record keeping, making sure we are covering the required attendance,etc. It’s been great, my system works, so I’m sticking to it! I’ll spend those two weeks between grades writing my curriculum for 1st grade, leaving off where we are now since he’s ahead anyway. This way I can double check curriculum standards and make sure he doesn’t have any gaps, and then just keep going.