Back on track? · Wednesday March 14, 2007 by Lily
Did I really say that? Rupert and dad raced to their Maths class last night and waited and waited…..the receptionist telephoned the tutor, eventually getting through to her to find she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. She came to the college and they started an hour late, so that’s 5 hours of missing lessons including the 2 lessons when there was no tutor.
We have had so many problems with courses and tutors that we’ve decided Rupert will try a full-time college course to gain the 4 or 5 GCSE passes he needs for entry to our local college in 2008. Unfortunately the local college, whilst requiring these passes, doesn’t actually run any GCSE courses other than Maths and English resits and Human Biology, so we are having to go further afield.
This morning began with dh going to look after our 2 granddaughters. He does this alternate Wednesday mornings although we’ve looked after them a little more over the past three weeks as both have had chicken pox. He takes them on to their nursery at 1.00pm. The little girls are being brought up bilingual as their mum is French. They help us in our studies with their knowledge of nursery French such as how to ask for a bib/drink of milk etc!
Rupert and I started some English. He has been doing work from “The Least You Should Know about English.” I really like this book.
When we first started HE I was given a copy of “Toe by Toe,” that we worked through. We are also still using “The Word Wasp,” and “Stride Ahead,” to help with his dyslexia difficulties, although a lot of ds’s spelling problems have worked themselves out with general life, reading bus and train magazines, websites and books; and of course talking on MSN and being part of forums. His chief problem remains to be comprehension that “Stride Ahead” addresses to some extent. A wonderful tool we use is Texthelp Read and Write that is installed on his laptop.
When ds was reaching secondary age, I visited The Education Show and selected appropriate text books, ones not too visually busy and not too wordy. We’ve never sat and worked all the way through text books though, but they are there to dip into as necessary.
This afternoon, dh has gone to see his mum, Rupert’s one remaining grandparent who is housebound and managing on her own. She will be 90 this year. He visits once a fortnight to help her and it’s a round trip of about 450 miles.
Rupert and I made a start on the second assignment in his IGCSE English course that we bought from Little Arthur Independent School. This is a very tricky assignment for him, it’s about analysing the writer’s use of language. He read the text, then I read it to him, we drew a mind-map to set the scene and then went through the text underlining the relevant parts for the first question. I then left him to have a go, went back and looked and tomorrow we’ll discuss it and work it through.
Ds made a home made pizza for his dinner, and then MSN beckoned. Wednesday is actually his only night in.
