Revelation

Nathan came home from school very frustrated the other day. This is a more common occurrence than I'd like but we're working through the issues and difficulties as they arise. This day's particular problem had to do with Spanish class. As most of you know, Nathan has a language disorder. One of his problems is that it is very difficult for him to learn vocabulary. English vocabulary. So to add Spanish to the mix is tricky. He was enthusiastic about the class at the beginning of the year but then the class sort of went to the back of my mind as we were struggling through some of his other classes. Well, the Spanish vocab has continued to accumulate and Nathan has not been memorizing it. The traditional method of flash cards wasn't doing it for him. He was feeling very frustrated as was I. So, we studied and then just put it away for another day.

I drive about 25 minutes in the morning to get to work. It is actually quite a nice drive as it is a pretty straight shot without too much traffic. Time to refocus my brain from home to work. Well this morning I was thinking about our Spanish problem and a solution (I hope) popped into my mind. I was thinking about the spelling program I used with Nathan last year called The Phonetic Zoo and how it really did seem to help him with his spelling. So I thought, "Hey, why can't we do something similar with Spanish?" So tonight I whipped up our new program. I printed out pictures of each word using a program called Writing with Symbols 2K. This is the visual input which Nathan needs. I then took my MP3 player and recorded the English and Spanish words several times. Now, Nathan can listen to the recording while looking at a picture of the object and (please, please, please) learn the vocab. The best part is that he can do this on his own and it doesn't take such a long time. We gave it a go tonight and he seemed to like the idea. I'll let you know if this works!