Clearly, they are still in love.

He kept asking me: “Is the plate full or empty?”  and it sort of confused me.  He asked in between each bite.  After about the third time I finally figured out he was asking if it was ok if he didn’t eat it all.  (Do I have to make the plate empty?) As soon as I told him he didn’t have to finish it, he looked relieved and left the rest of the cake.  A kid that isn’t really into cake just baffles my brain.

This book, From Head to Toe: The Amazing Human Body and How It Works, has been a fun resource this summer. It has good illustrations, fun text, and a bunch of easy to do experiments in it to help explain the content. We were sad to send it back to the library.

This is the experiment on taste, which involved simply putting different foods (salt, lemon juice, sugar, cocoa) in cups, then using cotton swabs to touch them to the tongue and describe the taste. After the initial experiment, they also experimented with mixing the tastes and trying that too. Simple, effective, fun.

Lego Fun.

There is a little kid buried inside of me that had to work hard to resist the urge to get annoyed that my neat little patterns were getting messed up by my sweet little helper.  (yeah, just a little OCD here)

He said he was making an airport

and she suddenly is starting to look older to me.

He got a kick out of Twister

The helpers are wearing their kid’s schedule around their necks to help with transitions (and probably to avoid the glut of kids checking their schedules on a wall someplace).  Zane isn’t as dependent on a schedule as he used to be, but in a group this big it really helps him cope.

This group is a lot more challenging for him and he would have never been able to participate in it in previous years, just because of the amount of people, the more chaotic (not bad chaos, just the natural “get a bunch of kids in the same room” chaos) environment, and the sheer amount of activity.  He was able to focus and complete instructions successfully.  He is getting closer to being able to handle a classroom situation, but at this point it would take a lot of anxiety meds on board if he had to do it routinely.  Doing it in a more controlled environment goes a long ways towards teaching him how to manage himself in this type of setting.  (the project he is working on is decorating t-shirts for the staff & helpers)

I am glad I get another semester to get a better picture of him with his student ST (well, mostly I am glad we get another semester with the ST in general).  Sadly, this was the closest to “looking at the camera” + “pleasant facial expression” in the group of pictures I took. 

The shirts were from a group picture they made, and each decorated the back of the shirt. If I remember right, his hand prints are the orange ones, near the “P”s.  Zane is surprisingly attached to this shirt.  I actually had to dig it out of the laundry to take a picture of it because he keeps grabbing it as soon as it is clean to wear it.

Zane HATES writing.  At home we have to do the majority of scribing for him because he struggles with trying to do the mechanical process/motor planning involved with writing, especially when trying to create meaningful content.  I had to seperate the components out to get anything done on the majority of schoolwork, and continue to include Handwriting as a stand alone component to keep hitting the motor skills.  We are now trying to begin the process of integrating the two of them together by encouraging him to write himself instead of dictating and having us scribe.  To motivate him, he gets a marble if he completes the small writing task himself, and no marble if he asks for help.  At the end of the session, he gets to take all of the marbles earned and drop them in a marble run.

Notice I refrained from any comments on the “Zane’s Marbles” jar.  What restraint I have.

And, the last minute or two of the hour is spent with the marble run.  (most of the pictures of this were blurry because he was excited and flapping like a madman.  lol)

This session’s experiment was putting Mentos into various kinds of soda pop to see which had the strongest reaction.  By the end of the experiment, he was wet and sticky from pop hitting him.  He kept licking himself. 

(photos from a combination of my cranky cell phone (first one), and the video the Clinical Educator is taking in this photo)

The kids made some cards for Grandpa/Opa and Zach:

From Zora to Opa:

From Zora to Daddy:

From Zane to Grandpa:

From Zane to Daddy:

And a few shots of lunch

How about this:

Smiley camera-ham girl  vs.  trying to get a good photo is like catching lightening boy

Amazing, isn’t it.