Help
With Your Rule
A Mother's Rule and a Child with Disabilities
Dear Holly,
We are homeschooling our Grade 9th and 6th sons, and also have an 8 yr old daughter who has uncontrolled seizures and autism. She goes to a school, only 5 min from home, for 2 hrs a day for therapies and autism classroom, which is also planned for in my rule.
I am having trouble getting my boys into the rhythm of the schedule. Every week there seems to be a meeting with a therapist or a specialist, or an unpredictable seizure at school which interrupts our school day. This takes priority& I don't usually have a choice of time.
Should I have the boys do their work as best they can while I am gone, and pick up the schedule from where ever we are when I return, hoping at the end of the year we will have covered all the subjects sufficiently? Do you have any suggestions? Thanks to the rule we are not in chaos (I have prayer time, the house looks OK, supper's on the table, schoolwork is mostly completed, my husband is happy). I just feel very unfocused during school time, which affects the boys, I think.
Labels: Homeschooling
posted by Holly at 1:20 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for your question!
I have a couple of suggestions, and perhaps others will as well. First off, I function on the principle that I ought to 'routinize' everything that 'can' be routinized. I would approach your therapists and specialists with your needs, and see if you couldn't come up with a regular weekly meeting on a certain day. I can't see why these professionals couldn't make accomodations to meet your other family needs.
My youngest needs speech therapy - I too found the meetings too scattered, so I arranged with the therapist to have the appointments during our family's Wednesday afternoon visiting time. On the weeks when my other children visit a certain friend, I take my daughter to speech and drop her off afterward. As such, because it is regular, we book our appointments 6 months at a time.
As for the unexpected seizures, I do not know if you need to go to the school everytime this happens. If you do, then I would have my older children work on their independent subjects at that time, if I could leave them home alone.
It doesn't hurt to have your older boys doing independent work daily anyway. I usually only tutor what needs to be tutored, and let the children do the practice work on their own, correcting and/or discussing it later. Other things, like Spelling and Math practice and Reading can all be done without needing me.
Setting up your homeschool to accomodate independent learning as a norm would give you the flexibility to meet your daughter's special needs when the time arose. In advance, you could discuss with the boys what the procedure is when you are gone. You could have their daily plans written out for the entire week, which would eliminate the need for you to tell them what to do for every subject for every day.
Thus, when they grew accustomed to working on their own, your absence for that short space of time to go get your daughter, wouldn't cause such an uproar.
Hope this helps.
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