Live a Meaningful Life

We finally got started with 4th grade around here on August 6t h. So far, so good! Here is the schedule we have been following: We will be attending Healthworks Health & PE classes 2x/month and will be doing a group Biology class on Fridays  in September-ending with a frog dissection. Also, starting in September we will be partnering with 3-4 other families for math/writing classes. We are going to do some active math learning 2x/month with this small group for the year.  We will continue to try to strengthen writing mechanics. MWF we are creating a writing journal so that he can track his progress over the year.  He has the hard part down-the creativity and great story lines. The language mechanics, handwriting and spelling--well, it is tough for him. I read 2 books over the summer about dyslexia that helped me to understand more about the operation of his brain and thinking. I completely changed the methodology of the way we approach writing and he reall...

Jackson started kindergarten at Saltillo Primary this year. He had been excited for months. He had asked 3,241 questions about how school was going to operate. John Gannon gave him several lectures about the process, set up practice "centers" for him to rotate through, and gave him lots of "what should you do" scenarios. He continually asked, "When is my school starting?" When I told him about his teacher calling, he practiced saying her name. At random times, he would say-let's practice if I don't know where to go. So, we would go through a role play in which he asked an adult for help and would tell them his teacher's name.  For those of you who have read this blog for a long time or who was around us when Jackson was younger-you know he had some extreme behavior issues. Yes, behavior was my day job-needless to say having it in my house definitely reinforced lots of those principles! The turning point was when I FINALLY realized Jackson...

Dear Public School Employee, Over the next few weeks your lives are going to intersect with hundreds of others. Some faces will be new, others will be old familiar ones. Every day you will face a very daunting task. A task that seems almost impossible in some cases. You see, the truth is you are going to come in contact with some damaged lives. On the outside, some look normal-like you. Others, well, you have already heard the stories from your friend teachers when you shared your rolls, right? Those kids aren’t too good at keeping it all hidden. You will find others that deal with things in ways that society surely doesn’t understand. You know these kids-kids who are overly sensitive, kids who growl at the lunch table, kids who crawl under desks and start screaming, teenagers who dress weird and and never make eye contact with adults, the kids who never makes an effort. You see, after a while of seeing these lives day in and day out, your brain starts making these assumptions. As...

One of my personality deficits that I was keenly aware of when I worked full time was my preference of staying on schedule. Yes, I liked to do things on time-preferably ahead of time. I liked to stick to a plan. Outlook was my friend. I was greeted every morning with a boxed look at my day. Guess what happened when those plans got messed up? Yep, I got irritable and the rest of my day just didn't feel right because I was trying to catch up or had to postpone things to another day. Over the course of the past 5 years I am much improved in that arena. I am much more chilled and detailed plans-I have found that most of the time, it is just best not to have any! If you read this often you know we just returned about a week ago from a trip. What I didn't realize is the amount of plans I had conjured up in my brain on the way home. What is really odd about it is that I never actually put the things on a checklist or in a nice excel chart...but anyway, I had a lot to do packed int...