A Helpful Podcast: "Classical Education for Students with Learning Differences w/ Courtney Ostaff"

 I am really enjoying this episode of The Well-Trained Mind Podcast.  Here's a link to the show itself. https://welltrainedmind.com/the-well-trained-mind-podcast/  The title of the episode is Classical Education for Students with Learning Differences w/ Courtney Ostaff.  The episode is part of Season 1, Episode 11.

The episode begins by talking about a famous reading comprehension study done called The Baseball Study: baseball-experiment-two-wisconsin-researchers-discovered-comprehension-gap-knowledge-gap. The results of the experiment showed that the more knowledge you have about a subject, the better reader you are about the subject.  

This episode of the podcast also talks about the importance of losing grade-level rigidity and continuing subjects like art, music, science, etc, for students with learning differences.  Because of my experiences homeschooling my own dyslexic kids, I completely agree with this.  I always felt like the more culture, literature, art, history, science, etc they could be exposed to would help scaffold them with any learning issues they have.

The podcast has links to the Baseball Study, as well as articles about writing with dyslexia/dysgraphia.

Review of Trail Guide to US Geography

https://geomatters.com/products/trail-guide-to-u-s-geography

We used Trail Guide to U.S. Geography for 11th grade this school year.  I gave my daughter 0.5 credit US Geography for completing the book, but this could easily be beefed up to cover a full credit.

My daughter loved this course.  It's very open and go.  

For the course, you need:

• The Trail Guide to U.S. Geography book (obviously)
• An atlas or a computer/tablet with access to maps
• A blank map of each state you study - we printed these from online
• Colored pens/pencils (those helped with labeling cities and drawing rivers and landforms)
• The book The Captain's Dog - if you plan to do the literature study at the end of the book
• A computer to search for information about the topics covered on each state's page
• A notebook if you want to take notes on each state 

The course begins with the New England states and continues with Mid-Atlantic states, Southern states, Midwest states, Southwest states, Rocky Mountain states, and finally the Pacific Coast.

The beginning of the book says there is a digital download available (student notebook), but we did not use it.  

Each state has three levels of mapping questions: elementary, middle school and high school.  We answered the questions to all three levels each time, because there were things my daughter did not know that were asked in the lower levels.

Topics covered include:

• Boundaries
• Capitals/major cities
• Major rivers, lakes and landforms
• Postal abbreviations - we did one for each state to refresh her memory
• Time zones
• Populations
• Climate 
• Agriculture, industry and economy
• A little bit of history

The beginning of the book lists required resources, extra things you can add (like Geography through Art and Eat Your Way Through the USA) and a sample schedule.

This was just a super enjoyable geography course.  I did the entire course with my 11th grader and even I thought it was a lot of fun.  We've done Trail Guide to World Geography and equally enjoyed that course as well.