Holidays and Vacation Days in PER
Are you traveling during the holidays? Will you be hosting family and making memories instead of doing school? If you're using PER, our free web-based planner, you can declare any day a holiday simply by creating a Non School Day. 
     When you create a Non School Day, you will be taking an entire day out of your Term. In general, your course work does not bump ahead when you use a Non School Day; however, if you have created schoolwork in a Course and then create a Non School Day, that work will bump ahead, which sometimes causes work to pile up at the end of the Term.
     To create a Non School Day go to your Parent's Home Page > School Calendar > Create a Non School Day. Enter the student, start and end date, type a description of the Non School Day (vacation day, holiday, college visit, etc.) and click save. If you have schoolwork that was created for that day, it will move forward until it reaches the last day of the Term.
     For more information about PER (Plan/Educate/Record), check out the FAQ section of our website.

Ginny Cronin's Writing with Pictures
Ginny Cronin is a columnist who writes the column Special Needs, Special Joys! at Home-School-Inc.com. She's a homeschool mother who helps families find ways to effectively teach their special needs children. Her methods and ideas help other families as well. For instance, if your child struggles to organize thoughts before writing, Ginny offers the idea of first asking your child to draw stick figure pictures about the topic. Here's more from Ginny Cronin's column "Reluctant Writer 1: David Hates to Write."
     "Begin with a two-picture story. Ask your child to draw the two pictures with stick figures. This is a helpful and simple way for children to organize their thoughts. It is simpler than an outline. It is simpler than a graphic organizer or a mind-map. It looks manageable to children who easily feel overwhelmed. When drawing these simple pictures sometimes they can pretend they are making a movie, and therefore can imagine what would be in the first scene. It can help to ask them, 'What happened first? What happened last? Is that the whole story?' With those three questions, a child often notices what important part is missing. Learning to draw a story in two pictures is the first step. The next step is teaching the child to 'tell the main thing that happened in the picture.' They need to focus on the main event, not on smaller details. After the main event, that smaller detail, called an 'elaboration,' puts interesting flesh on the bones of writing. Therefore, the next step is to teach the child how to 'tell me something more about that main thing.'"
     Click here to read more columns by Ginny Cronin, who also writes under the pen name Virginia Lawrence.

On the Move!
Did you know that even while we stand still, we're moving. We humans have no sensation that we're moving through space, yet we are. Every day the earth rotates at about 1,000 miles an hour, at the equator. Because we are on the earth, we're moving too, right along with it. We're also moving with our earth as it revolves around the sun. The speed of that trip is about 18 miles a second. Why don't we have any sensation that we're going at these very fast speeds? The answer has to do with the fact that we only sense speed when we're accelerating or decelerating -- or speeding up or slowing down. 
     Think of what it feels like to be a passenger in a car. While the car is moving at a constant speed, let's say 30 miles per hour, we have no sensation that we're moving. But when the driver suddenly "steps on it" or accelerates quickly, we feel that. We feel the change in speed, even though we don't feel different sensations at differing speeds. 
     If you've travelled on an airplane, think about what it feels like during take-off. Take-off is hard to ignore! But once the plane is going at a more constant speed, even if it's 500 miles per hour, we don't sense that. The same thing is true about slowing down. When a car crashes -- or stops -- we feel it. So because the earth rotates and revolves around the sun at constant speeds, we don't feel these speeds. But we're moving just the same. We're also moving with our solar system around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Why is our galaxy called the Milky Way? Because when we look at the night sky our galaxy looks like a splash of milk. It may not look to us that the Milky Way is moving, but that's because we're in it as it moves.

Special Education Resources

General
Homeschooling the Challenging Child
Raising Your Spirited Child
The Explosive Child
Learning In Spite of Labels
The Mislabeled Child: Looking Beyond Behavior to Find the True Sources and Solutions to Children's Learning Challenges
How to Maximize Your Child's Learning Ability

Learning Styles
Learning Keys (HSI exclusive - for 5th grade and up)
Homeschooling Methods: Seasoned Advice on Learning Styles
A Mind at a Time
The Way They Learn
Every Child Can Succeed

Reading and Writing
Let's Write!:  A Ready-To-Use Activities Book for Learners with Special Needs
Explode the Code
Learning Language Arts Through Literature