Our classrooms part 1

wow we moved 1.5 years ago and I'm just now writing a post about our news classrooms. we finally have natural light and lots of it and more space. I have divided our space in the most functional way possible. 

First up is our art/lunch/nap/science/dramatic play room. I now have lots of storage to change out our activities. 

our classroom has changed a lot since moving here but this is what it looks like currently. I have gone through a lot of different styles of tables and chairs and i think we finally got what works best for us and our wide range of ages.

Storage is so much more accessible now and way more organized than its ever been.

This side of the room is obviously the dramatic play area. Its always changing and always a mess. Looking for more solutions as to how to get toddlers to put things back where they belong. Behind the curtains is where I store our sensory bins and tray work that rotated daily. What you don't see in these pics is a narrow part of our room (picture a L shaped room) that's where our beds ad cribs are stored. 

 This is probably my favourite feature of this room. I used chalkboard paint on the wall then cut our a frame and nailed it to the wall and stained it. 

I fought these cuties off guard haha. 

On monday I will post pics of our other classroom stay tuned

***This post is linked up with Our Word wide classroom****

Valentine sensory writing tray

My little guy is almost 4 I can't believe it! He started preschool this month part time and he has no interest in his letters and numbers. As a mother of a beautiful sweet girl who happens to have dyslexia I knew early intervention is key. The little guy like his sister will only participate in writing trays if I make them look fun or add cute little details such as these foam hearts with the letters on them. I made sure to use pink for all uppercase and white for all lower case. 

you can find my post about the sensory stick HERE

Little guy showed some interest so it's a work in progress but we will get there. He still has a full year before he starts school.
Thanks for reading 😄

Branch sensory sticks

Recently I put together a sensory writing tray, we were using recycled wood coloured pencils as our writing tools. When I went to clean the tray after we finished there was a lot of pencil marks all over the tray. I thought hey, wouldn't it be great to have a pencil with no led of Color. I looked our pencils over and they looked just like tree branches but with coloured led in them. I remembered my daughter playing in the snow the other day and she was using a branch to drag along the snow to make tracks. The aha moment! I found the branch and took one small portion off. Then I cut using a chop saw to my desired lengths. 

Then I used a sharp knife and began chipping away till I got to the point that they resembled a pencil. 

Problem solved no more coloured pencil marks on our tray and best part it was free! Took about 15 min from start to finish to make 4. I may dress them up a bit with twine or paint on the handles. 

Trusting the Process

I'm all over the map on emotions and walk around in a daze of confusion. I wonder if that's what it feels like to be dyslexic? I haven't blogged in a bit because I was feeling really irritated by the lack of help in our area for kids with dyslexia. I called around to different agencies, schools, tutors, dr.'s etc. Its been very frustrating and draining emotionally. We continue to plow through each day and try to stay on top of her reading words while making the process fun to keep Jada's attention. I picked up Ron Davis's book The gift of Learning. Although I don't agree with his methods I do find him interesting and for a brief moment was willing to pay $3000 to have Jada in his program for 2 weeks, with the promise we would see quick results. Odds are if it sounds too good to be true it probably is! anyway, One thing i took away from his book was practicing making the alphabet out of clay. Since Jada is highly tactile and creative (most dyslexics are) I figured I would incorporate this into a lesson

Apparently 'N' is not a letter according to Jada. she had to start at A and sing the alphabet each time to figure out what the next letter was to make. Once we got past N this was a challenge for her as "n" is "not a letter". By the end of making both upper and lower case letters she finally acknowledged that "n" was indeed in the alphabet.

 This is us "resetting" Jada. This sounds strange but we have to give her something messy but fun every 3 days or we end up with our bathroom painted in soap or toilet paper soup in our bathtub. Her ADHD responds well to our "resetting". If I forget a day it comes back to bite me in a bad way. I learned this through trial and error and on a whim decided to give it a try and it worked! as a parent we have to figure things out for ourselves as to how to calm our little ones. Jada is currently still not medicated and its been very challenging. Going to the mall sets her off into a tail spin and she pretty near climbs the walls. Food courts make her puke and car rides bore her to tears. We hope and pray she gets some medication and some relief soon.

A bit of a update is that by dumb luck I found a tutor school I never heard of by talking to another agency about my son that turned into a convo about Jada. See, dumb luck. Anyway I called the tutor school and they teach Orton Gillingham! I cried, literally when the lady said Orton Gillingham was their primary teaching method. I have googled tutor schools in my area and this one never came up. The free tutor school has a 2 year wait list so finding this one was a huge relief. The lady is even opening the centre on a Saturday just for us! I guess when you pay big bucks for a program doors literally open for you lol with all that said I finally feel a bit of peace knowing that once she starts with the tutor program she will be in good hands. I have researched the heck out of OG and feel very good about the success rate of their students. There are some great youtube videos on OG. I wish I could find some personal blogs about other families journeys with Dyslexia. Google has not been my friend lately in this department.

 So our week looks like this:
Monday- Lindamood Bell 30 min
Tuesday- Swimming for ADHD kids 45 min
Wednesday- Girl Guides (sparks) 60 min
Thursday- Free
Friday- Usually a bday party or play date
Satrurday-  Dyslexic tutor (Orton Gillingham) 60 min
Sunday- play date

Here is Jada at her special needs swimming

Thanks for reading. I hope this post helps someone someday. It's so strange that there isn't a manual on what to do after you get a diagnosis. If she had a life threatening disease the medical community would be all over this. Parents are left in a frustrating position of finding resources to help their children with no government help or support. In the United States there are so many centres and tutors and supports for dyslexic students, according to my research anyway. In Canada it's hard to find good supports or anyone to coach you on what to do next.

Happy Easter dear readers!

Trays

Just some random tray work we did today:

 The Easter bunny will be here before we know it!

 Classification:

 I saw this on Pinterest. trace alphabet with paint and q-tip

 We got 40 cm of snow yesterday so I pulled out the sand play so we could pretend it was summer

Thanks for looking:)

Penguin Sight word feed

How cute is this sight word penguin Game? found Here  scroll all the way to the bottom of this link to find the printable fish.

I really liked this game because you can print the fish according to the dolch sections. Even tho you can only print  pre written words for pre-primer and primer, you can also print blank fish and just fill in with any word you want. as pictured above i added people in our family to our blank fish.  Jada LOVES animals! she was never really into dolls or typical girlie things. When i found this game Jada's class was doing a unit on penguins which was pure coincidence. Jada was so happy and got to work on her sight words., happily. I try to mix things up for her as much as possible because she gets board so easily and I don't want to take the fun out of learning to read. I think in the summer I may attach paper clips to them and do a sight word fishing game.  You could even make it into a matching game :)
Thanks for reading. I look forward to reading your comments:) Any tips, advice or links to Dyslexia materials and resources would be appreciated.

"Homeschool" materials for Dyslexia

In this post you will see the materials that have changed how Jada sees written text. The way I decided to teach Jada is not based on any recommendations by any psychologist or physician but based on the teaching philosophy of Picture me reading. I of course had to change and tweak the program a bit to accommodate Jada's learning style. That being said, I hope things improve in the future where she can learn strategies to decode words. However, at this point we do not have access to such programs as i posted in previous post. We are on the wait list for a private tutor school that teaches the Orton Gillingham program. I have more research to do but i hope to find the program privately. That's a whole other post tho...
So let's get started. First once again, this is a program from www.picturemereading.com and i am not getting any endorsements by posting my opinions of this program.

You will get cards that are the  Dolch sight words in the 5 groups: Pre-primer, primer, 1st grade, 2nd grade and 3rd grade. I laminated mine and put each section on a binder ring. There are multiple ways to organize the cards and suggestions come in the pack with full instructions.  one side is the word made into a picturegraph such as "up". once your child gets used to associating the picture with the word you then flip the card over as pictured below to the plain word "up".

Now it all depends on your child's level of dyslexia as to how fast they commit the picture words to memory. For us it took a few days and we only started with the words in the pictures above. I bought this handy table top pocket folder at scholastic as well as the hand pointer. Jada enjoys things that are as hands on as possible so the pointer was a great tool. Sometimes the pointer can be a distraction so at those times i put the pointer away and she has to earn it back by focusing on the task at hand. This has been a learning curve with the ADHD.  We spend about 15 minutes on learning new words and other nights around 10 minutes for review. Some nights we opt to review our words in a game format that i will post at a later date.
I also bought a booklet from picture me reading that helps you use the sight word levels to read common books that are mostly made up of sight words. A good example is: Are you my mother by Dr.Seuss

I bought this copy at a good will store so i didn't feel so bad highlighting all the words in the book that pertained to the section of sight words we are working on.  As she gets used to the next section of sight words I will go back and highlight more words. I also bought a smaller version of the pointer for this book but i couldn't find it for this picture.  It's exactly the same as the one pictured but smaller and one end is a pen.
After googling books based on sight words and visiting the library I had a really hard time finding levelled readers that were compatible with the pre-primer word list. I was frustrated and sad and felt stuck because we weren't quite finished learning all the pre-primer section. One late night I decided to just google " Dolch sight words"and  according to Wikipedia the best books for Pre primer is the old books from your childhood such as: Dick and Jane. I went back to the library and they only had a few of the Dick and Jane series. I then searched for the series on Chapters.ca and there they were all in their levelled reading glory! At $4.97 a pop it was a good find.

I also asked Jada's teacher for the very basic first reader books and she sent me a stack. I will have to ask her where she bought them from. With Jada we only read a few pages of a book a night or she will read a few and I will finish the story. I find I have to make it a game or she flat out refuses to read with me.

Now to backtrack a bit to the picture me reading cards. You are probably wondering how on earth I am going to teach all those nouns? Picture me reading has a booklet that has some examples of pictures to go with nouns such as boy, tree, shark, apple, cake, snow, Santa etc.

Since Easter is close I went ahead and made my own picturegraphs based on the frequent words around this Holiday. Also common words used at school over the next few weeks. I bought these lined cards from Scholastic as well as sentence strips. I'm no artist but you get the point ;)

When we first found out Jada was dyslexic i felt lost and has no idea where to turn or start. We are still in limo with what to do with her at school until the psychologist meets with them and gives her recommendations. We found out on valentines day and I knew the faster we get started on something, anything at all, the better her school life would be. I need to send out a huge thank you to www.dyslexiaroad.com because if she had not have posted about picture me reading on YouTube, where she linked her blog I would still be a miserable mess not knowing where to turn. 

She has great resources posted on her blog with other great tips such as huge white boards, auto books etc.

well dear readers I must go get our lesson plan started. I will update as I find more resources to help Jada.

Do you have ideas on apps or websites for interactive games for Dyslexic students? have a tip to share? I would love to hear them!

Thanks for reading and please leave a comment below and I will respond as soon as possible.