We had an informal chat about "what makes things stick" with her. Its all trial and error...and SUCCESS. When something shows as a disconnect her psych does detective work on where the misfire might be by looking at research done on adults who have had brain injuries. It doesn't fix things, but it might help us find more avenues for us to try in detouring around the problems.
Vowels are a real issue for her, we aren't at a point where we can do vowel combinations because Nature Girl can't even keep the 5 of them straight when she's writing - reading is another story. She's doing great there and as her anxiety wanes she's willing to take more risks - like reading aloud from unfamiliar text.
If I have her spell aloud I can see right away what words she's committed to memory and which are an issue. When she writes she has a tendency to either spell words using A for all vowels or not including a vowel at all. So I took out the writing issue completely and gave her letter stampers which make her scan the entire alphabet to find what she needs. I can say "This word does not have an A in it" and she will hunt for the correct vowel and get it right. The phoneme awareness is there. When I make her sight word cards I do the consonants in green and the vowels in red.
We're playing with language a lot too. I found a great resource for games that is full of the history of English and games that get her deconstructing words and putting them back together again, and she has been playing with it with her friend Rock Hound. It's called WordPlay Cafe: Cool Codes, Priceless Punzles & Phantastic Phonetec Phun. We'll be sending it along in her "summer school" bag.
Math is still a challenge. She has so much anxiety in relation to what she thinks she can't do. It takes a lot of gentle coaxing to get her past that anxiety. It didn't help that she had the grade three standardized testing to do and while she got resource support for it, she had a tummy ache every morning about it. Everyone is so kind to her, she knew she could skip questions she didn't feel she could do, but she is so hard on herself.
We're playing lots of dice games right now and working on her skip counting. I'll be sending a fun book of dice games along too.
I'm thinking about how best to approach math next year. I'm looking at "Living Math" resources that use a lot of storytelling from the history of mathematics to convey information and we're going to use the grade three Waldorf math curriculum that is very practical and hands on (forms of measurement) as our core and then supplement with JUMP Math.
She is not ready to move onto the 4th grade material yet. We'll keep working with the third grade materials until she has some basic mastery. Things like adding columns still confounds her and we need to have things like carrying and borrowing, skip counting, and place value in place before she moves on. All of these can be approached physically as well - and BEFORE she faces them on paper.
