Review of The Girl Who Thought In Pictures

I was so excited when I heard there was a children's book coming out about Dr. Temple Grandin. A children's book about the woman who made autistic adults visible for the first time? Yes, please! I was even more excited when I was accepted for the opportunity to receive an advance copy in exchange for my honest review. Yay for not having to wait! But then I read and and thought, "huh." Actually, I had a lot more thoughts than that, but I second guessed myself. This was a children's book; I was probably overthinking it. But then I showed it to an autistic friend and her autistic daughter and asked them to read it and tell me what they thought, and they said a lot of what I was thinking without me saying anything first.

First Day of 2017-2018 School Year

Here we go again!

Now Also Blogging

  I wrote in February that I didn't want to turn this blog into all about autism. Then Blogger started really not working because after a certain point, Blogger runs out of space, the pictures become broken, and it won't even let me fix stuff. So I'm finally blogging again, and very little of it is going to be here. I am going to keep the autism specific stuff over at Wibbly Wobbly, Neuro-UNlogical Stuff and the purely homeschool stuff here.  So that's what's going on right now. First Day of our new school year is next Monday!

Math Facts Help for Digital Learning

  There is an idea I heard about from some homeschooling moms for kids who are ready for higher math but don't have their math facts memorized. The idea is for them to use a times table or other with the facts written down, and refer to it as needed. As they continue working on the higher level work they will have the facts reinforced by them seeing it and eventually they won't need it anymore. But in the meantime you're not frustrating the kid with boring repetition when they're ready and interested in going beyond 5=2+3. Early Bird is back to doing math at Dream Box (at his request) for the next few months. Since he always does that on the laptop, I turned the area into a math center for him with all the reference materials and tools he may need to make it smooth sailing.  I used Command Hooks to hold up his Right Start abacus (I love Command Hooks,) I got the cute 10 Buddies print out from Teachers Pay Teachers (free to download!) and the rest I either used a Google image search or made myself. Early Bird does well learning from visual sources, so here's hoping this will work for him.