schooling outside the box

sometimes homeschooling is great and i don't hate it at all. there are certainly days when i want to shuck that kid off to school & pass her aspie issues to someone else so i can have a break, but so far this school year, we're doing quite well. i've made a lot of changes in how i structure our days and it seems to be working nicely for the brookster. i'm more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person, but she's not & since it's her education we're working on here, i need to be more flexible in accomodating her need for a schedule.

we've had great sucess in keeping the cats close at hand for intermittent "kitty therapy" when brooke starts to feel overwhelmed. it helps to defuse volatile school situations when she can dig her fingers into some warm kitty fur for a minute.

though, sometimes, the cats can be more of a distraction than a help...

i was trying to help her understand fractions a couple days ago and the little manipulatives we were using weren't quite making the point. so i wrote on her feet. i told her that if i was only in the mood to eat 1/3 of her foot, look how much she'd still have left!

and this one, brooke took of herself. she was doing an art project where she needed to make a realistic picture of someone lost in thought. she couldn't think of exactly how to draw it, so she set up my camera on a timer & posed herself in the position she wanted to draw her picture critter. here's her drawing.

and when we have to tackle things that i know are going to be really difficult, i try to think outside the box in order to make them more fun. for instance, yesterday we were needing to do some dictionary practice. brooke detests doing anything dictionary related. alphabetizing is really hard for her and spelling is rough too, so i had to come up with a way to make it less suckish. so i had her look up the following words: plop, boll weevil, tuna, fat, urine, hag, tinkle, spit, breast, tinkle, mud. then i read the definitions to her in a very prim, proper voice. today, she's begging for more dictionary time and she even said that if we don't have time for it during school hours, maybe we could do it after school. i would have to count that as a win.

i suppose i need to do a little work on phone etiquette though because yesterday when we were at my sister's house, the phone rang. brooke picked it up and said, "woof," then hung up. oops.