Taking the Scenic Route

I had her use a chair as a counter to mix the ingredients.

And she insisted on cleaning up afterwards.  As if I would argue.

The girl can turn a quick run to Dillons into an adventure.

Ice cream on the patio.

Zora is continuing one of her favorite past times, but we have noticed that she stays in the shade as the sun has gotten so hot and bright outside.  It is cool to see her making some leaps in art again, including adding actual limbs and filling things in (although she still sort of loses the original lines after she has filled them in at this point)

Like a lot of homeschool families, we don’t take off in the summer.  It allows us to take off more when the parks/museums/zoo ect aren’t as crowded when all of the other kids are in school.  Both of the kids have been on a “body” kick, and we seem to find a large amount of material that has continued to interest them, so we just keep going.

This book, From Head to Toe: The Amazing Human Body and How It Works, has been a fun resource this summer. It has good illustrations, fun text, and a bunch of easy to do experiments in it to help explain the content. We were sad to send it back to the library.

This is the experiment on taste, which involved simply putting different foods (salt, lemon juice, sugar, cocoa) in cups, then using cotton swabs to touch them to the tongue and describe the taste. After the initial experiment, they also experimented with mixing the tastes and trying that too. Simple, effective, fun.

It isn’t unusual to be uploading my camera to the computer and discovering a series of photos taken by somebody else, totally unbeknownst to me.  This set made me chuckle because of the context.  We went to a family reunion, forgot to take the camera inside with us, but  Zach obviously found the camera while I was chatting with my family as we were getting ready to leave.

It showed three things.

First, apparently, I talk too long

Second, we really need to wash the windsheild

And third, Zach found a way to entertain the kids while they were waiting.

When we play the Wii as a family (which consists of 2 of the 4 of us actually having remotes because one is missing, and one is broken.  We suspect the same former guest at our house is responsible for both incidences), we make sure each kid gets to play something they like, and are trying to get them to play together nicely.  Zane listened, because this time we played every time she got stuck he had his character go back, pick her up, and carry her with him.  It was sweet to see him find a solution that made everybody happy without us prompting it.

Lego Fun.

There is a little kid buried inside of me that had to work hard to resist the urge to get annoyed that my neat little patterns were getting messed up by my sweet little helper.  (yeah, just a little OCD here)

He said he was making an airport

and she suddenly is starting to look older to me.

Although “Friendship Group” is a social skills group, they had an additional Social Skill playgroup that he was able to participate in this year.  It took place about 15 minutes after one of the Friendship group times, but was a bit bigger.  We got to see some other kids we have made friends with over the years that weren’t in his current FG, and that was neat.

He got a kick out of Twister

The helpers are wearing their kid’s schedule around their necks to help with transitions (and probably to avoid the glut of kids checking their schedules on a wall someplace).  Zane isn’t as dependent on a schedule as he used to be, but in a group this big it really helps him cope.

This group is a lot more challenging for him and he would have never been able to participate in it in previous years, just because of the amount of people, the more chaotic (not bad chaos, just the natural “get a bunch of kids in the same room” chaos) environment, and the sheer amount of activity.  He was able to focus and complete instructions successfully.  He is getting closer to being able to handle a classroom situation, but at this point it would take a lot of anxiety meds on board if he had to do it routinely.  Doing it in a more controlled environment goes a long ways towards teaching him how to manage himself in this type of setting.  (the project he is working on is decorating t-shirts for the staff & helpers)

I am glad I get another semester to get a better picture of him with his student ST (well, mostly I am glad we get another semester with the ST in general).  Sadly, this was the closest to “looking at the camera” + “pleasant facial expression” in the group of pictures I took. 

Zora spent the summer doing individual ST once a week, and participating in a Phonological Awareness Playgroup once a week.  The group had a theme each week based on a book (I think this weeks was “Blueberries for Sal”, thus the themed snack) which targeted various phonological awareness skills, and they reinforced skills they worked on in individual ST.  I think it was also a peer model/ST client mixture of kids.  Since these kids aren’t on the spectrum a camera is much more intrusive, so I waited until the last day and just got a few photos.

Well, I didn’t catch pictures of them in their session this time around, but here is the majority of the group of kids.  There were a total of eight kids, a combination of kids on the spectrum and peer models.  The oldest peer model (not pictured) gave a talk about this as her 4H project this year, which I thought was pretty cool.

The shirts were from a group picture they made, and each decorated the back of the shirt. If I remember right, his hand prints are the orange ones, near the “P”s.  Zane is surprisingly attached to this shirt.  I actually had to dig it out of the laundry to take a picture of it because he keeps grabbing it as soon as it is clean to wear it.