I was shocked when I discovered that a lot of Jimmy's teachers at the autism school he was in didn't touch type.

They had to write zillions of reports -- special ed is HUGE on paper work -- and they were all hunting and pecking!

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jun 2005

The whole time I was growing up my dad was always saying, 'Learn to type so you can support yourself in case anything ever happens to your husband.'

I am a phenomenal typist (yes, I just said that).

Back when everyone used Selectrics my typing rate was something like . . . 90 wpm.

Could have been slightly more (or slightly less---don't remember).

And I don't make mistakes.

(translation: I don't make many mistakes)

My dad was right.

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jun 2005

Can anyone run Tux Type???

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jun 2005

SummerSupplementTimePart3

(Posted for Carolyn, by Catherine)

When I get back from my business trip, summer supplementation will start in earnest. Right now Ben is getting a bit of a free ride (especially with me being out of town).

Since school ended last week, I've been hand-writing a sheet of 5 problems for Ben to do every night. We're working hard right now on acing long division, and I want Ben to have long division problems to do that precisely target the areas that he still needs to work on. The sheets are generally a mix of long division problems, some other sorts of problems (tonight it was multidigit decimal multiplication), and a word problem. I keep the total number of problems down, and I design them so that I have a reasonable expectation that he will be successful on most of them.

[Success is really the carrot that keeps a kid moving through a program. You generally don't have to struggle to get them to work, if they feel they are succeeding. Keeping the kids working at their true level, and letting them experience gobs of success, should be (I feel) the main goal of summer supplementation.]

Next week, we'll begin working from Prentice-Hall Mathematics Course 1. I confess that I am dreading sitting down with Ben and cracking that book open. It's very busy and overstimulating; our eyes will be spinning like cartoon characters' for a while. We'll have to live with the series for two or three years, though, so it will be good to work on finding ways to cope with its horrid format over the summer.

I did some preliminary reconnaissance on the book last night. I was pleased to see that Ben already knows a lot of the material; so well, in some cases, that I feel we can skip certain chapters outright. The first section we'll work on will be Section 1.3, on sequencing of decimals.

Math won't be our only area of work this summer, though. Because Ben doesn't pick up vocabulary from context very well, he is a bit behind his peers in reading vocabulary; but this past year we discovered that he learns vocabulary very easily if he acquires it through direct instruction. The best vocabulary program for him is one in which he looks it up, sees it used in context, selects the correct usage for it, and then finally generates his own usage. The Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop series seems to be exactly what he needs.

I have one more goal for Ben this summer: I want him to learn to touch-type, or at least to get him started. As a girl, I never learned how to touch-type; in fact, I dropped out of touch-typing class in high school (back then, though, being an expert touch-typist marked you as the secretarial sort, rather than as the thoroughly modern computer-savvy sort). As a result, I hunted and pecked until I forced myself to start touch-typing a few years ago (I still don't do it correctly).

Bernie, my husband, had no such secretarial hangups, took touch-typing in high school, and has touch-typed ever since. It's a great skill to have, and I want Ben to acquire it early.

We're an unusual household, computer-wise (and probably in many other ways, but never mind that). For one thing, we have computers for pretty much every member of the family, and a bunch more dinosaur computers and parts moldering in the basement that we can't bear to part with. Furthermore, they are all running Linux, and not even the same distribution twice; we like variety around here. This generally means that we can't run Windows software, so buying Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for Ben is not really an option.

Happily, there is a free and open-source alternative: Tux Type (Tux is actually the name of that little penguin on the Linux logo. Every movement has its mascot). We have Tux Type on one of the kids' computers, and I tried it out the other day; it's not as much fun as Need For Speed, of course, but it's not bad; I even found it a bit addictive. I think it's more fun than Mavis. I should be able to get Ben playing it without too much fuss.

Especially if I bribe him.


FreeWorksheets
TreadingWater

SummerSupplement
SummerSupplementTime
SummerSupplementTimePart2
SummerSupplementTimePart4 (resources for kids who have fallen behind)
SummerSupplementTimePart5 (resources for preventing summer regression)

SaxonPlacementTestsAndGuides
SingaporeMathPlacementTest

TeachYourChildToTypeThisSummer

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• Posted by: CatherineJohnson
• LogDate: Jun 13, 2005 @ 10:39