Do you twitter? I'm just getting the hang of it -- I think. It really is a fun way to meet and interact with others in your niche.
I thought this was hilarious!
H/T BabyBlueOnline
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Help with Curriculum - Homeschooling & Down Syndrome
I've added a bunch of resources to my sidebar to the right. It didn't take me long after we started this homeschooling journey with Miss R that we needed to look outside typical homeschooling curricula if we were to keep moving forward in learning. Materials for typically developing children just moved to fast and didn't break down skills to the level she needed. Of course, there is no perfect curriculum for the child with Down syndrome - all will have to be modified but here is a good start for those just beginning their journey!
A Few Special Educational Resources
Some Math Resources
Reading Resources
A Few Special Educational Resources
Some Math Resources
Reading Resources
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Bringing Awarenss...
The International Down Syndrome Coalition for Life
If you think the lives of children with Down syndrome are precious, head off to see this site! I'll be placing an order for my International Down Syndrome Coalition for Life t-shirt tonight.
Did you know that a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome drastically reduces the child's chances for survival? The termination rate averages around 90% for those children with a prenatal diagnosis!
What a tragedy...
If you think the lives of children with Down syndrome are precious, head off to see this site! I'll be placing an order for my International Down Syndrome Coalition for Life t-shirt tonight.
Did you know that a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome drastically reduces the child's chances for survival? The termination rate averages around 90% for those children with a prenatal diagnosis!
What a tragedy...
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Anglican Prayer Beads or Rosary Revisited
I’ve mentioned before that I love praying with beads. The Anglican rosary blends the Roman Catholic rosary and the Orthodox Jesus Prayer rope together to be used as a form of contemplative prayer.
The practice of praying with beads among Christians dates all the way back to the Desert Fathers in the third century though use faded with the Reformation and was even banned by some Reformers.
The rosary survived in the Church of England though use faded over time. In America, Roman Catholics and various Orthodox congregations kept the practice or praying the rosary alive. I grew up praying the rosary in the Roman Catholic Church and was overjoyed to find the practice alive and well in The Episcopal Church. I came to learn that Anglican prayer beads are fairly new to the church in the United States. During the 1980s, an Episcopal priest and his congregation renewed the practice using a simplified design with a cross rather than a crucifix and used prayers based heavily on scripture.
As a person called to a life of prayer, I find the rosary a very useful transition tool. It often isn’t easy for me to divorce myself form my daily busy-ness as a homeschooling mom to enter into the quiet presence of God in prayer. I write a little more about it here. I also use my beads as a vehicle to intercessory prayer.
On my busier days, I fall back to my routine memorized prayer (Celtic Prayer) using my beloved beads. On better days I’ve been trying to pray the Christian seasons using Praying With Beads, Daily Prayers for the Christian Year, by Nan L. Doerr and Virginia S. Owens.
While exploring Lent and Beyond this morning I was excited to find this new (to me) devotion to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit using Anglican prayer beads.
If interested in praying with the Anglican rosary, a wide variety of beads and prices are available on Esty. You can also easily make your own!
Photo Credit
Friday, February 27, 2009
Learning and Down Syndrome - Part Three
One of the most often missed keys to overcoming obstacles to learning in children with Down syndrome (Ds) is the use of errorless learning. There was a period in Miss R’s life when I was looking for ways to lift her out of the preschool era. I call it an era because it seemed to go on forever! This key discovery, the errorless learning technique, lifted us beyond the preschool era into the elementary phase!
I would like to talk about errorless learning and the connection to motivation issues, how they impact each other and what we can do to create a more optimal learning environment for learners with Ds.
Motivation
Miss R is, like most children with Ds, extremely sensitive to failure. She hates to fail. Period. As an adolescent, she has better tools to meet failure with and works to persevere on most tasks but it hasn’t always been this easy.
I often questioned my contribution to this problem as we moved through the early learning years. As I looked back, even to infancy, there was little I could have done to prevent this sensitivity to failure. Let’s look for a moment at our infants/toddlers with Ds.
Even very young children with Ds meet many experiences with failure. Decreased muscle tone, common in children with Ds, results in ineffectual movement. Speech and language delays, along with articulation difficulties result in ineffectual attempts at communication. Did you know that self-evaluation of competence occurs in early stages of development before the child can express themselves verbally?
So, I guess it is really no surprise when we see our children develop strategies to avoid failure. Patricia Oelwein writes in her book, Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome, (pp. 23 – 25 ) as to the lengths our children will go to avoid tasks that are too easy or too hard – from the misuse of social skills (taking advantage of the extra chromosome cuteness factor) to acting out behaviorally.
Given our children’s frequent exposure to failure they commonly have decreased motivation when learning new skills and concepts. Decreased motivation, along with inefficient learning processes (perhaps related to cognitive abilities and auditory processing difficulties) in children with Ds, contributes significantly to obstacles to learning in our children.
So what is a parent (especially a homeschooling parent) to do? In our experience, we began to look for ways to guarantee successful learning experiences which make for more efficient learning. How can we keep our children motivated? Give them positive, successful experiences! Success feeds motivation!
Errorless Learning
Errorless Learning offers our children success learning experiences without failure. It is defined as teaching new tasks by guiding the child through each step of learning a skill or concept correctly, not allowing them to fail. As the child becomes more capable, the prompt or cue can be reduced until it is not needed.
The key to errorless learning is errorless teaching. Errorless teaching uses the same language – a script - with each lesson and repeating the process several times (as long as it takes) following the same steps, in the same order, using the same words while using some sort of visual input (picture or possibly sign language) to incorporate what is most often our children with Ds learning strength.
Hopefully, this method will develop a strong base for higher levels of learning such as problem solving with a trial and error approach. One thing I have learned along this homeschooling journey is that allowing Miss R to make a mistake encouraged her to repeat the mistake and then incorporate the mistake or error into her knowledge base.
The most familiar errorless learning technique is the matching, selecting, & naming technique taught in Teaching Reading by Pat Oelwin. Children with Ds are guided throughout the process of learning new words without failure. Very successful and very exciting for the young reader!
Suggestions regarding the use of the strategy of errorless learning:
Be sure to have the child's attention...some children need training to attend.
Use language that is understood by the child. Develop a script to use when delivering lessons. Teach any unfamiliar language using errorless teaching/learning.
Target skills you want to teach. There are several developmental skills lists that will help decide what your child needs to know when. Take into consideration the child's interests.
It is important to break down even the basics into small steps. Teaching the plus sign for addition requires the teacher to name the sign and the child to match, select, then name it such. Children with short-term memory problems - where errorless learning is most needed - need practice at every step.
A key to learning for those children who have developmental delay, learning difficulties, attention problems, is to work only as long as it is fun and interesting. Once they reach a level of fatigue or boredom it is time to switch gears and move onto something else.
Always keep learning sessions positive. The parent or teacher’s attitude is extremely important. No matter how many times you have taught the lesson or what you mood is at the moment, keep the lesson positive and uplifting. Our attitudes are quite apparent to our children and impact learning....especially children with Ds. As you may know, they are very sensitive to our moods and feelings.
Sincere, appropriate praise is important to children.
Modeling is important to many skills....show the child how to complete the task. For example, hand washing has many steps and will need much practice for many of our children to complete independently. Sometimes physical support is necessary...hand over hand for skill development.
Don’t forget to fade the support, prompts and cues with success.
If you reach a point where the child is frustrated or unsuccessful, bring the lesson back to a successful place before ending the session.
Patience, patience, and more patience is needed for teaching our children with special needs. If I child does not appear to be getting it then often times it is not their fault...or the teachers! So many factors can impede the learning process...memory issues, processing issues. Sometimes their development is just not at the right place for learning a concept and can be returned to at a later date. I have been amazed when returning to a concept that I put aside for lack of progress only to find that somehow something clicked and Miss R has incorporated the concept!
Errorless learning can be used with very young learners to the more sophisticated of learners. It can be applied to most concrete learning. Some examples would be:
Learning colors
Learning letters
Learning letter sounds
Sight words
Math concepts
Learning numbers
Money Skills
Telling time
"Wh" questions
The list can go on & on....
One more thing before I end this post, I want to give you a simple example of teaching a concept using errorless learning. For example, when introducing shapes show the child a picture of a circle, use whatever script you develop to teach such as “This is a circle. A circle has no corners.” Present the same visual and script for as many times as necessary and soon the concept will be incorporated and you will hear your words repeated back to you! It is as simple as that!
Learning and Down Syndrome Part One and Part Two
I would like to talk about errorless learning and the connection to motivation issues, how they impact each other and what we can do to create a more optimal learning environment for learners with Ds.
Motivation
Miss R is, like most children with Ds, extremely sensitive to failure. She hates to fail. Period. As an adolescent, she has better tools to meet failure with and works to persevere on most tasks but it hasn’t always been this easy.
I often questioned my contribution to this problem as we moved through the early learning years. As I looked back, even to infancy, there was little I could have done to prevent this sensitivity to failure. Let’s look for a moment at our infants/toddlers with Ds.
Even very young children with Ds meet many experiences with failure. Decreased muscle tone, common in children with Ds, results in ineffectual movement. Speech and language delays, along with articulation difficulties result in ineffectual attempts at communication. Did you know that self-evaluation of competence occurs in early stages of development before the child can express themselves verbally?
So, I guess it is really no surprise when we see our children develop strategies to avoid failure. Patricia Oelwein writes in her book, Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome, (pp. 23 – 25 ) as to the lengths our children will go to avoid tasks that are too easy or too hard – from the misuse of social skills (taking advantage of the extra chromosome cuteness factor) to acting out behaviorally.
Given our children’s frequent exposure to failure they commonly have decreased motivation when learning new skills and concepts. Decreased motivation, along with inefficient learning processes (perhaps related to cognitive abilities and auditory processing difficulties) in children with Ds, contributes significantly to obstacles to learning in our children.
So what is a parent (especially a homeschooling parent) to do? In our experience, we began to look for ways to guarantee successful learning experiences which make for more efficient learning. How can we keep our children motivated? Give them positive, successful experiences! Success feeds motivation!
Errorless Learning
Errorless Learning offers our children success learning experiences without failure. It is defined as teaching new tasks by guiding the child through each step of learning a skill or concept correctly, not allowing them to fail. As the child becomes more capable, the prompt or cue can be reduced until it is not needed.
The key to errorless learning is errorless teaching. Errorless teaching uses the same language – a script - with each lesson and repeating the process several times (as long as it takes) following the same steps, in the same order, using the same words while using some sort of visual input (picture or possibly sign language) to incorporate what is most often our children with Ds learning strength.
Hopefully, this method will develop a strong base for higher levels of learning such as problem solving with a trial and error approach. One thing I have learned along this homeschooling journey is that allowing Miss R to make a mistake encouraged her to repeat the mistake and then incorporate the mistake or error into her knowledge base.
The most familiar errorless learning technique is the matching, selecting, & naming technique taught in Teaching Reading by Pat Oelwin. Children with Ds are guided throughout the process of learning new words without failure. Very successful and very exciting for the young reader!
Suggestions regarding the use of the strategy of errorless learning:
Be sure to have the child's attention...some children need training to attend.
Use language that is understood by the child. Develop a script to use when delivering lessons. Teach any unfamiliar language using errorless teaching/learning.
Target skills you want to teach. There are several developmental skills lists that will help decide what your child needs to know when. Take into consideration the child's interests.
It is important to break down even the basics into small steps. Teaching the plus sign for addition requires the teacher to name the sign and the child to match, select, then name it such. Children with short-term memory problems - where errorless learning is most needed - need practice at every step.
A key to learning for those children who have developmental delay, learning difficulties, attention problems, is to work only as long as it is fun and interesting. Once they reach a level of fatigue or boredom it is time to switch gears and move onto something else.
Always keep learning sessions positive. The parent or teacher’s attitude is extremely important. No matter how many times you have taught the lesson or what you mood is at the moment, keep the lesson positive and uplifting. Our attitudes are quite apparent to our children and impact learning....especially children with Ds. As you may know, they are very sensitive to our moods and feelings.
Sincere, appropriate praise is important to children.
Modeling is important to many skills....show the child how to complete the task. For example, hand washing has many steps and will need much practice for many of our children to complete independently. Sometimes physical support is necessary...hand over hand for skill development.
Don’t forget to fade the support, prompts and cues with success.
If you reach a point where the child is frustrated or unsuccessful, bring the lesson back to a successful place before ending the session.
Patience, patience, and more patience is needed for teaching our children with special needs. If I child does not appear to be getting it then often times it is not their fault...or the teachers! So many factors can impede the learning process...memory issues, processing issues. Sometimes their development is just not at the right place for learning a concept and can be returned to at a later date. I have been amazed when returning to a concept that I put aside for lack of progress only to find that somehow something clicked and Miss R has incorporated the concept!
Errorless learning can be used with very young learners to the more sophisticated of learners. It can be applied to most concrete learning. Some examples would be:
Learning colors
Learning letters
Learning letter sounds
Sight words
Math concepts
Learning numbers
Money Skills
Telling time
"Wh" questions
The list can go on & on....
One more thing before I end this post, I want to give you a simple example of teaching a concept using errorless learning. For example, when introducing shapes show the child a picture of a circle, use whatever script you develop to teach such as “This is a circle. A circle has no corners.” Present the same visual and script for as many times as necessary and soon the concept will be incorporated and you will hear your words repeated back to you! It is as simple as that!
Learning and Down Syndrome Part One and Part Two
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Lenten Blog Carnival
Jessica, at Homemaking Through the Church Year, has graciously offered to host this year's Lenten Blog Carnival. This Carnival is not just for Anglicans. All denominations are invited to participate!
See last year's Lenten Carnival hosted by Kerry at A Ten O'Clock Scholar for some wonderful ideas on how to make your Lenten journey meaningful and ways to involve the whole family.
See last year's Lenten Carnival hosted by Kerry at A Ten O'Clock Scholar for some wonderful ideas on how to make your Lenten journey meaningful and ways to involve the whole family.
Learning and Down Syndrome - Part Two
As I said in Part One, children with Down syndrome (Ds) often share a set of observable behavioral traits known as a phenotype. These traits are different than seen in typically developing children and children with other causes of intellectual disabilities. I like to look at the big picture or the whole child. These traits do not occur in isolation but influence each other and can cause obstacles to learning.
Not all children with Ds will show the typical learning profile seen here but the majority will. I must say Miss R fits this picture perfectly! Targeting the strengths of children with Ds will result in a more optimal learning environment. Working to strengthen the weaknesses in the profile will give the child the tools to increase functional competence as they grow.
Typical Learning Profile
Strengths
Visual Processing Skills (relative) – the ability to make sense of information presented visually
Visual Memory Skills (relative) – visual recall abilities.
Receptive Language Skills (relative) – often understand more than they can say or sign
Strong social skills – they enjoy learning from social interaction where meaningful two-way communication and interaction takes place.
Effective use of gesture (pointing, guiding) and sign language in preverbal communication
Weaknesses
Speech/Language Delays with Articulation Difficulties
Auditory Processing Deficits – the ability to make sense of what they hear
Short-term (Working) Memory Deficits
Delays in Fine & Gross Motor Skills
Impaired Cognition
Behavioral Difficulties ranging from attention issues to acting out negatively.
What this really tells us is that children with Ds are primarily visual learners. They have great difficulty learning from listening. Therefore, all learning material must be paired with visuals and/or sign language as a visual cue. Miss R has always had good language skills and communicated her needs quite well so we had no need to learn sign language. Teaching to her visual learning style and frequent repetition while keeping learning errorless were the keys for her in consolidating concepts. Homeschooling has been such a gift to us! It has given us the ability to implement what the research tells us about learning and Ds.
Coming soon - errorless learning.
Learning and Down Syndrome - Part One and Part Three
Not all children with Ds will show the typical learning profile seen here but the majority will. I must say Miss R fits this picture perfectly! Targeting the strengths of children with Ds will result in a more optimal learning environment. Working to strengthen the weaknesses in the profile will give the child the tools to increase functional competence as they grow.
Typical Learning Profile
Strengths
Visual Processing Skills (relative) – the ability to make sense of information presented visually
Visual Memory Skills (relative) – visual recall abilities.
Receptive Language Skills (relative) – often understand more than they can say or sign
Strong social skills – they enjoy learning from social interaction where meaningful two-way communication and interaction takes place.
Effective use of gesture (pointing, guiding) and sign language in preverbal communication
Weaknesses
Speech/Language Delays with Articulation Difficulties
Auditory Processing Deficits – the ability to make sense of what they hear
Short-term (Working) Memory Deficits
Delays in Fine & Gross Motor Skills
Impaired Cognition
Behavioral Difficulties ranging from attention issues to acting out negatively.
What this really tells us is that children with Ds are primarily visual learners. They have great difficulty learning from listening. Therefore, all learning material must be paired with visuals and/or sign language as a visual cue. Miss R has always had good language skills and communicated her needs quite well so we had no need to learn sign language. Teaching to her visual learning style and frequent repetition while keeping learning errorless were the keys for her in consolidating concepts. Homeschooling has been such a gift to us! It has given us the ability to implement what the research tells us about learning and Ds.
Coming soon - errorless learning.
Learning and Down Syndrome - Part One and Part Three
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Ash Wednesday
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
A repost from 2009 when I was a better blogger...
Today we begin our Lenten journey we are reminded of our mortality and humanity. Anglicans, like Roman Catholics, are required to attend Ash Wednesday services for the imposition of ashes (and the Holy Eucharist) as we begin this penitential season of fasting and prayer. Lent is not optional for us -- we are invited and called to prayer and fasting. It may be strange to some but I love Lent.
A little on the history of Ash Wednesday.
As we begin this season of fasting, we often give up certain foods but the spirit of fasting is related more to freeing ourselves from outside control, distractions and temptations which separate us from God. Can we let go of that which controls us and give ourselves over to freedom found in a closer walk with the Lord as a child of God? A freedom which allows us to serve Him - to shape God's kingdom on earth.
St. John Chrysostom on Fasting
[from Sermons on the Statutes]
Do you fast? Give me proof of it by your works.
If you see a poor man, take pity on him.
If you see a friend being honored, do not envy him.
Do not let only your mouth fast, but also the eye and the ear and the feet
and the hands and all the members of our bodies.
Let the hands fast, by being free of avarice.
Let the feet fast, by ceasing to run after sin.
Let the eyes fast, by disciplining them not to glare at that which is sinful.
Let the ear fast, by not listening to evil talk and gossip.
Let the mouth fast from foul words and unjust criticism.
For what good is it if we abstain from birds and fishes, but bite and devour
our brothers?
May He who came to the world to save sinners strengthen us to complete the
fast with humility, have mercy on us and save us.
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