The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [99]
The hearing specialist tested Rosie and declared her to be the “best listener and lip reader I have tested.” She is on call for us if Rosalie gets into hearing problems again this winter. The last audiometry showed 80 percent hearing in her right ear and 75 percent in her left. Not bad for having needed nine sets of ear tubes and having had six ruptured eardrums. In October, the vision specialist arranged our use of a Voyager reading machine at home. Instead of having to hunt for large print books, Rosie can now place any book in the Voyager, which uses a video camera to magnify the print into any desired size. Rosie can adjust the clarity and read without fatigue. Wow! According to Maureen, we will have the use of the machine until Rosalie is eighteen. We had been having problems finding appropriate books for her: large print books are expensive to produce, and few mid-level children’s books come that way. We had read everything the local library had on hand—one small shelf of classics such as Treasure Island, Pippi Longstocking, and Alice in Wonderland.
Rosalie is a very sweet, smart, and lovable person who has patiently tolerated running this maze of the health care system. She speaks with wisdom beyond her years, and only asks that the health care providers that we deal with treat her with respect. Her homeschooling experience has been vastly different from Shauna’s, who has been remarkably healthy all her life. Shauna understands how scary it is for Rosalie to face surgery after surgery, even though she is usually pretty stoic about it. Shauna has a lot of respect for her little sister. She does feel twinges of jealousy at the attention Rosalie’s health problems demand, but is really very understanding about it. My goal is to not create the sense that being sick is the way to get attention. I have taught both girls that “If you need attention any time, just ask for it. Please be straightforward about what you want; tell me.” When Rosalie is hospitalized, I stay with her from door to door. I hold her in the operating room when they give her IV sedation and am in the recovery room as she begins to wake up from surgery. Being separated from her sister and from her mom is hard for Shauna. Her homeschooling at such times usually involves writing in detail about what she did, so she can share it with Rosie when we return home. The two sisters are very close, as I have seen to be the case in many homeschooling families.—Carol, California
We have two children, one with autism. Our daughter attended a generalized early intervention (EI) program for special education students for three years. EI was an inefficient use of my daughter’s time. The first year, the teacher was too laid-back and had low expectations. The second year, the teacher was fresh out of college and had no idea how to educate children with autism. The third year, the teacher knew how to cater to our daughter’s learning style, and we worked as a team in developing strategies, tools, and so on. That year proved to us what she could do when paired with a knowledgeable teacher. Most of the speech therapy was group work, which was wasted on our daughter because she needs one-on-one attention. She didn’t qualify for occupational therapy until the end of her final year in school.
The answer became crystal-clear: My daughter was spending six hours in school, five days a week. I was working with her only ten hours a week at most due to my full-time career. Yet she learned more at home than she did at school (except for the one year with an excellent teacher). I knew this because I often had to tell the teachers what our daughter could do and show them how I “got it out of her”! Other factors played a role in our decision: She is extremely sensitive to noise, and it’s hard to create a quiet learning environment in school. Even during her “good” school year, my heart broke to see her cower in a corner at a Christmas party because all the kids screamed excitedly when they saw Santa