A new link

There is a new link to the right, and it goes to Allison and Jacob's Summer Blog.  I thought an appropriate title might be "My Mom is Making Us Blog This Summer," but then decided the humor might be lost on the kids.  There are actually not any posts yet - since it's not summer and the kids are still blissfully unaware that this is part of Mom's master plan to make summer "educational" too.

The original plan had been for this to be Allison's project.  One of her therapy goals has been developing "story-telling" skills.  These range from being able to tell us a story about what happened earlier in the day with sufficient detail to being able to infer meaning from the stories of others.  She's made lots of progress in this area.  In kindergarten and first grade, she couldn't even seem to keep the activities of her day straight to tell us about them later.  As in - we often had no idea what would happen at school.  "Did you do music today or gym?"  "I dunno."  It's not that she was clueless at the time things were happening - but the filing, sorting, and retrieving parts of her brain needed more.....development(?).  Those things have gotten better with practice and maturity, and we've graduated now to improving the narrative - filling in details and generally taking the parts of the stories and creating a whole "followable" thing.  Also, reading comprehension is replacing simply reading as the skill focus in school.  What happens next, what were they feeling, what is the theme here?  While Allison does fine with the reading words aspects - she still struggles with themes and tone and all that other softer stuff.

So I thought that writing about her days in the summer and posting pictures from her camera would be a great way to work on those skills.  But then, we also learned that Jacob has a fear of writing.  See post on his suspension from school.  So why not add him to the mix!  Misery loves company - or something like that.  My goal for him is to learn to take the copious thoughts that seem to ramble around in that noggin of his and put them in print.  (Today: "Mom, would you like it if all the concrete was squishy instead of hard?")  He has SO MANY ideas, but seems reluctant to write about any of them.

I think it might be fun.  My idea of fun may clearly diverge from their idea of fun.  But check back for postings soon, and please comment if you read their page.  Part of the fun for them will be that someone is actually reading it.