In my life this week…

Philip has long had some hearing loss from his cancer treatments. The loss is in the higher frequencies with normal hearing lower down. This meant that he has trouble hearing certain phonic sounds, particularly s, th and z. Mostly he had been taught to fill in the blank and he was pretty good at it. He also had other help in the classroom with the teacher being amplified. However this didn’t allow him to hear those sound and it started to affect him speech. He was dropping the sounds that he could not hear himself. The Distance Learning provider that we are enrolled with got funding to provide speech therapy and an assessment. All of this led us to reexamine getting him a hearing aid. When we first looked at this there were some new devices on the market that would shift the frequencies that he can hear down in to the areas that he can as well as amplifying those frequencies. The rest of his hearing is left alone and not amplified. At the time they were very expensive and unproved technology. This time they are practically the standard and much cheaper. Thus he now has a hearing aid for his worse ear. He immediately commented on being able to hear the s sound in speech again.

You have probably noticed that my website is undergoing some changes. My wife decided that blog needed updating, fully agreeing with her, she has started to make some changes. The biggest was to bring it up to the most recent version of WordPress. Due to the blog being inactive for a while and a previous problem it was not an easy upgrade. Thus it had been put off until we could take the time to do it properly with backups and fallback plans. She also has a much better design eye than I have. She has not finished that part yet but she is planning to next week. The best part is I can now install some plugins that I have been wanting, particularly a recipe one.

In our homeschool this week…

The audiologist we see is in a town about an hour north of where we live. Having registered for our local homeschooling conference I knew that there was a homeschooling store there. Thus we took advantage to look around. Now I have two choices and they both have strengths and weaknesses. The new store is bigger although I’m not sure that the curriculum section is any bigger. It does have a lot more science related materials. All the stuff that you need to do experiments. It also has a big educational toy area. The downside was organization partially due to my unfamiliarity with the layout. I would need a lot more time in the store to peruse it all. It also sells ice cream cones. Good and bad at the same time. I really don’t need the temptation but boy they looked good.

The end result of that trip was deciding to buy a microscope. I need to go back and actually buy it. With that big of a purchase I needed to do some more research. I want something that it going to last years. The best one they have is called the Professor made by Ken-a-Vision. After a lot of searching this seems to have good reviews and will last. We will find out.

We also had the opportunity to listen to a talk given by David Eberth a palaeontologist at the Royall Tyrrell Museum. A lot of his talk was about how we categorize creatures. Some of the traits are shared with modern creature, some are unique to dinosaurs. The kids were full of excellent question that led to why some creatures survived the asteroid impact and other didn’t. They also talked about the evolution from dinosaurs into birds and the discovery of Archaeopteryx. Great time. He was in town for some other events but we couldn’t make it to those. I would have takes the older two to an ‘adult’ event but not my littlest.

My kiddos favorite thing this week was…

I would have to say it was getting his hearing aid. I don’t think we can truly understand what he actually hears. I know the chart above but trying to imagine what that is like is hard.

I’m cooking…

My daughter had a play-date this week. Our schedules have been so busy it is tough to find time but over spring break there are some gaps. I decided to make Chocolate Chip Cookies with them. I don’t think she has ever cooked before. They had a lot of fun with it and I sent her home with some cookies.

One of the meals this week was Beans, Meatballs and Pineapple. It is as simple as its title suggests and can be altered to stretch out the meat.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share (silly, serious or both!)…

You know you are a homeschooler if you got a parking ticket because you found a new homeschooling store and lost track of time looking at curriculum.

Ok I didn’t really get a ticket but I was over time.

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