Not a meal plan

Usually Tuesdays are when I post our meal plan for the week. This week, though, it isn't much of a plan. We had split pea soup tonight and tomorrow night we're having chicken mole. That's it. This is mainly because some of us are heading to Michigan for a long weekend. The older people staying at home (jobs and school can be inconvenient things) will fend for themselves, and we will cook at the beach house, but I'll figure out what we're having when we get there. There is an Aldi nearby, so we'll be set.

I wanted to share a couple of successes with you instead of menus today. Normally, homeschooling (or parenting) children who have learning challenges is a slog. Concepts take a long time to be understood with a lot of repetition; in the middle of it all it can feel as though no progress is being made. Slow progress is like that. Even slow but steady progress can be difficult to see. I mean, a person moving forward an inch every hour would not appear to be moving, but come back in a few weeks and you would see immediate progress. (Yes, it's a ridiculous analogy, but it makes the point.)

This morning, as I was working with H. and R., I had a huge success with each girl. First, R.; she doesn't have a lot of huge successes, so this felt even more exciting because she knew she was doing a great job. For her work with me I got out the ice cream cone matching activity box. This box has a laminated ice cream cone with loose, laminated different colored scoops of ice cream. There are then cards which show different combinations of ice cream scoops put on the cone. The child then matches the picture by putting the scoops on their own cone in the correct order. It's a little tricky because they have to plan ahead and put the scoops on in the correct order. (You can see a picture of it if you click the link up above and scroll down in the post a bit.) R. had done this box before, but still needed some help to put the scoops on in the correct order. I don't think we even ever made it to trying the four scoop cones last year. 

Today, I set the box up for her, and let her try the first cone. She did it without my help! This alone would have constituted a success in my book, but we kept going. She did the second one by herself. So we tried another... and then another... until finally she had done them all. The only help I gave was to point a couple of time to the bottom scoop on some of the taller ones so she would remember which to do first. Amazingly enough, this small cue was all she needed to get back on track. I was so excited for her. Even better, she was aware that she was doing something challenging and was excited for herself. Self-awareness is only an emerging skill, when it emerges at all, so knowing she was doing something well and being happy about that for herself is probably as huge as being able to do the task. I could have stopped there and counted a good school day.

But wait, there's more...

I then moved on to working with H. I'm trying to sort out exactly where we need to focus our work, so I've been giving her a lot of different types of activities to do over the past couple of weeks. Today, I grabbed a set of Go-Together Cards. These are cards that have big photographs on them of things which... yes, you guessed it... go together. So there is a picture of a hamburger and it's companion is a picture of French fries. Some others are a checker board one one card and checkers on another or a paintbox on one and paint brushes on another. I particularly remember the paintbox and paint brush cards because they are the reason why I put this activity away for years. 

Maybe four years after H. came home, I set this activity out thinking it wouldn't be too hard and we could use it for vocabulary and some critical thinking. If only it had worked that way. It was a total bust. She couldn't match any of the cards without significant help. She couldn't remember the names of anything on the cards. Even when I limited it to just three sets, it was still impossible for her. Even when I limited it to just the paintbox/paint brush, she couldn't remember the words to name them. I'm pretty sure that was a morning where I ended up in my bathroom with a cup of coffee recovering. I spent a lot of time there during those years. 

Today, four years after that, I finally felt brace enough to try it again. (That alone shows you how awful the whole thing was for the two of us.) So I set some of the cards out. H. looks at them and before I've even finished setting them out, has named and matched several... including that dratted paintbox/paint brush set. There was no hesitation; there were no incorrect matches. She knew all the words. She could talk about most of them and why they went together. I finally set out the rest, including some that were a little more esoteric. She nailed all of them. Her reaction was one of, "This wasn't hard, why am I doing this?" I asked her if she remembered doing them a long time ago, and she didn't. That's probably just as well. It wasn't one of my finer moments.

But the difference! It took four years, but she has moved so far past those cards now. I knew that she has been progressing, but sometimes it takes going back to a past failure and watching her succeed that really helps put that progress into perspective. I don't care if H. is turning 18 next month. I will keep teaching her as long as she is making progress.

Oh, one other thing I didn't share yesterday which is on the same topic. It is not unusual to walk through the house and see various children draped in various positions with their noses in a book. H. is not often one of them, though I do catch her reading (or "reading"? I'm never sure), every so often. Well, yesterday, I heard H. chuckling to herself. When I finally come across her, I notice that she is reading a Nate the Great book. She is reading a book to herself and laughing at what she is reading. Only someone who is really understanding what they are reading is going to chuckle to themselves. How cool is that?