I realized I haven’t posted a picture of Sully in a Wordless Wednesday recently. So here is Sully with his cousin eating ice pops at the pool over Labor Day. His cousin is almost 15 weeks older then him, so they are fairly close in age, which will be lots of fun for the 2 of them as they grow up.

Frozen Yogurt!

Here are Eloise and Desmond on one of the therapy swings while Desmond is doing Physical Therapy. Eloise had to come with us to therapy this week since preschool hasn’t started yet so she got to go with him for the first part of his visit. I know it is blurry, but the iPhone isn’t great at action pictures.

Rakhi, we celebrated Rakhi a few weekends ago at my in-laws so here is Eloise putting Rakhi on her brothers.

Eloise playing outside

So we are homeschooling Desmond for Kindergarten and likely for much longer. We are planning on taking it one year at a time so for the moment we are homeschooling Kindergarten. What this means is that Desmond started Kindergarten July 2nd. So we’ve already had our first month of classes. I still haven’t added in all our subjects yet for various and assorted reasons, but we have been doing Math and Reading daily, and we’ve been doing prehistory and science 3 to 4 times a week as well. Desmond is somewhat enjoying it. I don’t actually expect him to love it, since I am making him do work rather then just play or watch TV all day. He is doing quite well though. We have almost finished our first half of his math book (there is an A book and a B book, we are halfway through the last chapter in the A book, we skipped and did the last 3 chapters before coming back for the chapter we are doing now).

I try to add some fun elements to his lessons, so we use a bunch of manipulatives for Math. Recently the big ones have been using dice from my big box of dice to do addition, subtraction and putting numbers in order. He also has a bunch of Math, Reading, and Science apps on his iPad that he is allowed to use during various parts of the day.

He does have some trouble staying still, but fortunately he can get up and do some jumping jacks, or run around a bit before having to come back and concentrate since I am just dealing with him. We can also take short breaks between subjects which he likes as well.

As for what we are doing, I picked out a mix of workbooks/textbooks, unit studies and other activities to do for our lessons. We are using Singapore Math 1A and will be moving into 1B sometime this month as our main Math core. We are using All About Reading for Reading instruction, this has actually changed since we started at the beginning of the month because what we were using was not working. We also read a lot of books together throughout the day.

We are using unit studies for Science, right now we are learning all about dinosaurs. We have a dinosaur fossil we are excavating from stone that we will put together. We will make a volcano when the fossil is put together as well. We also plan to visit the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. We are reading a lot of books about Dinosaurs as well and using the First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life as our main spine.

We are also doing a prehistory unit, and learning about how the Earth came to be and about the beginning of life and how animals evolved and humans came into being, at a level he can understand. We are also using a second history curriculum so that he learns a bit about US history and the different states as well. It is called Adventures in America and is a very basic low level overview of the history of the United States of America.

Our handwriting books just arrived yesterday as well. We are starting off with Handwriting without Tears, which he works on various parts of with his OT as well, so it should hopefully work out well for him. He hates handwriting or any writing or drawing so it is going to be a bit of struggle to get him to do it, but I am hoping it works out for him.

I am also thinking of working on some photography with him for art, since he loves taking pictures, and it seems like something he would really enjoy. We also listen to various classical music and I hope to start him in piano lessons once he starts reading fluently, he has been told that it is his reward for learning to read. Once he is cleared for physical activity we are thinking about putting him in Tae Kwon Do classes as well and we will go swimming a few times a week as well. He is a fairly decent little fish at this point in time, so I don’t think we are going start up swimming lessons again for a bit.

It looks like we are doing a lot, but it really doesn’t feel like it when we are doing it, and he has tons of free playtime too, we are normally done by 10am most days with seat work, and then have the rest of the day for therapy, reading, playing and just having fun.

Here is Desmond working on place value with money this afternoon. You can see part of my huge box of dice right next to him.

Doing math. One of Desmond’s favorite things to do is roll my dice. I have a huge box of dice, so there are a ton. We’ve been using them to do addition, subtraction and also seeing which is bigger and which is smaller. He is putting the 4 dice he rolled in order on his number line.

Desmond working hard to find a dinosaur fossil.

Desmond is home, he has been for a week, but I haven’t had time to update since we got home, we’ve been busy getting readjusted to being home, and going to all his appointments. He is thrilled to be home and even more thrilled to have his neck brace off finally. It is so nice to be home. We are all starting to adjust to being here now, which is good, Desmond is so happy not to be at the hospital anymore.

Here he is with his neck brace off (big picture sorry):

And here he is at the house playing with his iPad:

He is doing great. He walked a bit with support today. This is him napping right before PT.