#100DaysOfHomeEd…Day 57

The pranks just keep rolling…

Yesterday, Cookie Monster locked his keys in the old house. So he asked to borrow mine. Easy, right?

Not at this #HomeCrazzyHome where every day is…

April Fool’s Day

Although to be fair…PanKwake had actually hidden my keys on April 1st. I just had not gone looking for them until the 2nd.

So here we are…scouring the house…and #HomeCrazzyHome is a HUGE one to cover. With what seems like a possible million hiding places.

I was able to narrow it down a bit as I vaguely remembered that she captured them and ran into the Gaming/Art/School room while I was working in the garden. But even then…there are loads of boxes, drawers and organizers in a very tiny space.

It took us fifteen or twenty minutes to finally find them…in her pink stool/storage container.

But the point of it was…

Memory!

PanKwake could not remember hiding them.

She has difficulty with the short to long term memory process. Oh, don’t get me wrong…certain things she has almost miraculous recall on.

I remember one time when she was describing a day in the park from some months perhaps even a year before. I had forgotten that day as at the time we were spending lots of days in the park and one blended into the next.

But not her. Even to the point that she described it so well I could eventually retrieve that stored data…sort of like writing the perfect Google search to find just the article you were looking for.

But when it comes to other things…visual in particular…she struggles.

Which of course makes learning challenging.

She has mastered her numbers…but then again it is just ten symbols…zero to nine to remember. And she is slowly getting there with her letters. At this point she can recognize about twenty of them consistently. But putting them together into words is still hard. She knows perhaps a dozen of those including her name.

Most of the time…it is copying the most common ones that she needs for her games. Words like…

• Play
• Save
• Quit
• Home
• Yes
• …and No.

But it is also the ones that she needs for chat. That is a challenge. But it is also the greatest pathway to reading. Her motivation.

When she was playing Meep City in Roblox on a daily basis, I made both a notebook and flash cards of the ones she and other players used the most…

• Hi (she knows this one as well as her name now)…
• Follow me…
• Will u adopt me…
• Come…

Of course, it was a constant litany of…

Mom, someone’s saying something to me. Hurry up!

Usually in the middle of the night.

But that is radical unschooling…getting up at 3 a.m. because your child has a teachable moment.

It is paying off though. Her carer told me the other day that she was recognizing more and more words.

I took an online course in helping those with dyslexia…and I learned so much. For PanKwake as for me…phonics does not make sense…because she cannot decode. She cannot actually hear some sounds. Some words sound alike to her. Like ask and ass.

Compound that with the memory issues…and we know that we are in this for the long haul.

We are also beginning to explore technological adaptations to compensate….but more about that tomorrow…