School days...

School started August 25th. Even though Ben's bus comes at 6:30 in the morning, he runs down the driveway with sheer glee everday! He always prays at the dinner table every night (which is such a sweet blessing) and he never forgets to thank God for school. I was nervous about the early bus time, since he's not a morning person, but here it is already Oct 2, and he's gotten up every day joyfully at 6:00. He rides on a special bus for kids in the exceptional childrens program, although it looks like a regular school bus. There is always an extra aide on the bus, which is good because Ben usually sleeps the whole way home (45 min) and the aide wakes him up. The bus driver and aide are very nice, and seem to be hand picked to work with special kids. Ben waves goodbye to them everyday, until the bus is out of sight. I was very impressed with all of Ben's teachers, from his main teacher for the deaf, to his speech/language pathologist, the ESL teacher, and the interpreters that go with Ben when he leaves his class... like to go to recess, lunch, music, etc., where he and another boy from his class (Taylor) join a regular hearing class for those activities. Ben gets homework everyday. I'm learning a lot about teaching Ben. Since my ASL experience is only 1 year & Ben's is almost 6 months, at times we must break out the ASL dictionaries & the english/chinese electronic translator. It gets even trickier when the two ASL dictionaries have different signs! There are concepts that have seemed challenging to interpret, like subtraction with regrouping, math word problems, odd & even numbers, ABC order (he didn't know the american alphabet) and much more. But, Ben and I have gotten through it all... and in fact, he's brilliant. To my surprise, one night the teacher sent home 2 little books, and part of his homework was to read them to me. It was only a few weeks into school and I wondered, how will he sign this to me?? His written english was zero at the start of school. He's never been taught the signs for connecting words like "the" or "is"...because ASL drops all those types of words. In fact, the way Ben will learn written English is by sight. Meaning, he must remember each word by sight, instead of sounding it out like a hearing person. Well, I was impressed! I just had to video it.