Tim at 6.5 Years Old

Tim is now 6.5 years old and still has a great zest for life. He is highly energetic, full of sillyness, very creative and has an unlimited imagination. He is being homeschooled which works out very well for him. He was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 4yo and our homeschool environment gives him both the structure of knowing exactly what to expect (we do schoolwork every morning after breakfast) and the freedom to wake up on his own, when he is ready for it, and not having to be somewhere at a certain time.

Academically, he is really good at math, and one of his favorite toys is his calculator. We got him his own personal calculator a few months ago and that was a huge success. The reading is coming along more slowly, but we are working on it and I feel we have found the key to his learning style. For example, we have an activity called 'silly sentences' in which we have cards with words, with which we take turn making sentences. I use word families and high frequency words. I add a few new words every few days, so that his vocabulary increases without him really noticing. The results are sentences like 'The cat and the bat pee on my hat in the toilet'. The fact that those cards include words like pee and toilet contribute to their success, I think :-)

He also still has speech issues, and has started speech therapy again in January. It is too soon to tell whether this is working yet. His speech is often very unclear, even we as parents then have problems understanding him. That leads to a lot of frustration for everybody. We feel that his long term ear and hearing problems have contributed to this and we suspect that they are also the cause of his slower start at reading. But I am confident that when we keep working on it, we will resolve all this!

The picture on the top right, shows you that he lost quite some teeth already. I think it looks really neat, so very age appropriate! One day, he had lost a tooth and had put it underneath his pillow for the tooth fairy and he kept getting it out and looking at it. Of course, the inevitable happened and it disappeared in the chaos in his room.... He was totally upset and devastated. Luckily we could console him by writing a note for the tooth fairy, explaining the situation and putting that underneath his pillow. The next morning, he found a dollar and a note back from the tooth fairy, telling him that that had happened before and at least he hadn't eaten it, since that happened to some kids too. He thought that was totally hilarious! Then, a few weeks ago we had other kids over for a play date and they were running around a lot and Tim lost yet another tooth. But this time he did swallow it, we think!! Luckily by this time he didn't get upset, but we just wrote another note to the tooth fairy :-)

Tim really likes to play pretend games, both with dressing up and with his Lego, Playmobil and other toys. Here on the left, you can see him dressed up as a king. Yesterday we found a knight's helmet in the thrift store, that makes a nice addition to our dress up things and he wore it about the whole day yesterday. He also builds big lego cities and castles together with Cees and daddy and they make up lots of adventures in them.

He also really is into Pokemon, I got lots of Pokemon cards at ebay and use them as easy incentives for all kinds of things. Very succesful with Timmy. Another favorite of him is playing at the computer. There is a wide variety of games he likes. From Treasure Mountain to Kid Pix, from Spy Fox to Fisher Price Pirates, there is always something he wants to play.

He does karate and has gotten an orange belt in it, with one yellow stripe. He loves doing it and I think it is really good for his self confidence and his development of focus and gross motor skills. It also is a fun way to meet other kids.

He is not riding a two-wheeler bike yet, but we are working on it. I really hope he will be able to do it this summer, our snow finally has melted so we can start working more on it than we were able to during the winter. It would be nice for him when he masters that skill.

Since the kids watched the birth of Kate, it came up in conversations pretty regularly and a few weeks later, at dinner, they started to wonder about how exactly the baby got conceived. The boys knew about sperm and the egg and how they get together to form a baby, but now were wondering exactly HOW daddy got the sperm into mama... So we did some explaining and they expressed an interest in watching the proceedings..... We politely refused that idea :-), but Timmy kept insisting. 'But if I am really, really quite, can I watch then? Please?' I didn't mind having the siblings at the birth of a baby, but I draw the line at them being at the conception!! *LOL*