I run an Arts and Crafts Club, which takes prepping and setting up for each session; with limited mobility I find it very challenging; I love to share arts and crafts with kids though, and I know Rye thoroughly enjoys it too. I was a bit sad that only the house kids did Art Club today and no one from our wider home ed community came. I may drop running the club as an home ed activity, and just do it as and when with Rye and the other RH kids - less stressful and less prep and setting up. That aside, the leaf prints were great fun!
Wednesdays are also Cubs night; we did have a wee blip last week with Rye being unhappy - further investigation revealed he's also being told off for messing around and that combined with his feelings of being left out of the games resulted in his desire to drop cubs. We chatted and I told him I'd have a word with his Cub Leader and the advantages of cubs, and how there will always be something that we find difficult and may make us unhappy - the trick is not to let those things ruin the over all experience. So he's agreed to continue with Cubs for the term and we'll re-evaluate then.
Rye has also asked to do sports; he really wants to do football and the like, despite team games being very difficult for him. I would love to get him into athletics, because he is a surprisingly fast runner! Anyway, I decided to see if there was a sports club for children with difficulties and autism, happily there is and it's only a mile away - not so happily, its also on a Wednesday 4-5pm!
Also fitting in daily reading, writing and maths can be challenging. Though I do want to shout Rye's praise; he read the Rosie book to me again, while I cut up an old sheet for art club; so he was sat opposite me, and while I had to keep reminding him to "sound out the letters", he did manage to read the book, and figured out a few words completely on his own!
Afterwards I asked him to choose a sentence to copy out in his handwriting book. Hmm, the muscle memory for letters just isn't there anymore; he's really struggling with copying the words from the book while also trying to remember how to draw the letters, write on the line and keep his letters between the line guides....its all scrambling his brain a bit.
It was a bit of a slog, and I had to keep stopping and chivvy him up, and knock him out of "I can't do it" mode. I had him telling himself affirmations in the mirror, which he found highly embarrassing and funny - but at least it made him laugh! I think word formation/copy work can wait a week or two, a couple of weeks really hammering home and helping to develop that muscle memory of how the letters are formed, will bring on his writing more than making him write out sentences, with letters that are formed incorrectly and not readable. I'm surprised he's regressed with this, his writing was coming along lovely. Still, no worries, it happens, we'll just go over it again - I suspect he's on a verge of an "eureka" moment with reading - so I suppose a bit of a regression with the writing isn't totally surprising - this one step forward, one step back thing, is a familiar pattern with him.
Mind, the sentence he wrote out was terrible, letters all over the page, no clear spaces between words; the words not copied correctly...so I wrote the sentence out for him, so he could see exactly what I required. He struggled so much with writing an "a" though, that we stopped and for ten minutes I took him through, curve, line and tail, bit by bit, break the a down to "c" shape, then having him draw the line from the bottom of the c to the top, then back down and a little tail... it was a tad excruciating; but it worked, he is forming "a's" correctly, just need to break the habit he has of making the tail so exaggerated it looks like a joined up "au". Still, we went from chaotic writing all over the page, to fairly neat, within the lines writing! I think Rye was rather surprised when I pointed out his progress, just how much he'd made - mind, he was probably still recovering, bless him.
I confess I did dig out his mecano, expressly because it requires good fine motor skills and hand to eye coordination and concentration. I need to try and sort out an area in the flat where we can sit and build models together, floor is not a good option for me.
Rye independently worked on his space project. He has a model of the solar system; and he built it all by himself and painted it. He is very pleased with himself.
And yesterday the boys found the biggest sticks EVER!
