Life Skills

Today, I was in the middle of helping my son learn to spell "independence," and he broke down in frustration.  He said, "I can't do it!" and literally flipped out.

He's been very frustrated with his brother lately.  His brother has developmental delays, medical issues and special needs.  He sometimes has trouble expressing what is on his mind, so he will scream in frustration.  He loves taunting my homeschooled son, calling him names he doesn't understand.  I send him to his room.  My homeschooled son simmers with fury.

So today we talked about emotions and choices under the heading of "Life Skills."  I bought him a binder and instructed him to decorate it any way he wishes.  The name of the binder will be something like, "My feelings and choices book."  His job is to learn to identify his feelings, give them a name, and stop and think about the choices available to him.

We talked about applied behavioral analysis as it applies to his brother.  We discussed the things that motivate his behavior, and how he will do just about anything for attention, even negative attention.  The way to motivate him is to pay attention.  Paying attention to unwanted behavior simply reinforces it.  He's starting to catch on.

Somewhere online another mother described a tool that she uses to keep track of her child's schooling.  I found a columnar pad with five numbered vertical columns and 40 lines per page.  I used 17 lines for entries of areas that I think he should study.  It's a lot of areas of study, and we can't possibly cover them all every day.  They are:

voice
acting practice
math
science
grammar
vocabulary
spelling
reading comprehension
geography
social studies

life skills
foreign language
music theory
guitar
spirituality

With a little effort, I'm sure we could come up with a lot more.  For example, history.

Some of these topics could be addressed in minutes per day.  Ten minutes on little bites of grammar, a quick twenty minutes with Sequential Spelling.  It only takes 10 minutes a day to fill five rice bowls doing vocabulary words.

Today, apart from helping my son learn to identify and manage his feelings, I'm taking a "staff development day," where I'm working on an itinerary of a road trip to see the historical sites in our state.  Should be fun!

(edited to omit the extra science entry on the list.)