Do you have a child with a learning disability who is struggling in school and doesn’t seem to be progressing. Have you wondered if homeschooling your child would make a difference, but you don’t know what resources are available for children who are learning disabled? Whether children were exposed to drugs, alcohol, trauma, or suffer from a genetic learning disability, one-on-one tutoring with the person who knows them best and actually cares about their future can make a difference. Quite often the LD child is easily distracted so the less people around the better. In public school systems, LD children may be teased or worse, so I am not sure about the benefit of the social interaction. The fast-paced environment may cause the LD child to consider cheating or not doing the work at all to avoid being made fun of, or just to keep up with peers. While medication may help children with LD concentrate, the pace may still be too fast for the child actually to absorb the material.

Even though you pull your LD child out of public school to homeschool, your child is still eligible for services at the school if your child has a valid IEP. If the Individual Education Plan specifies speech and language, or occupational therapy, you can transport your child to the school for scheduled services. With your child at home all day, you can also spend more time teaching your learning disabled child life skills. Skills like grocery shopping, laundry, menu planning, bill paying, and cooking can be incorporated you’re your curriculum. After all, these are offered at public school as life skills, home economic, childcare, and business math. These are skills that your child will need as an independent adult.

Do not purchase curriculum for your child based on age. Test your child in each subject and purchase curriculum that your child can do regardless of grade level. You are wasting your child’s time, and your time, if you give too difficult of work. It can result in defiance, or lying about completing schoolwork. Administer a placement test to your child to determine the grade level your child should be studying. This site offers free downloadable placements tests. Make sure you ask them how to interpret the results though because the test does not make placement suggestions. You do not need to purchase all curriculums at the same grade level. If your child can do fourth grade science, but sixth grade math, then that is what you should purchase. That is what the school does when they pull your child out to the resource room for special instruction. However, I have found that sometimes the school makes the special education work too easy, so the children are not challenged at all.

If your child enjoys working on the computer you may want to try computer based classes. For example, the Switched on School House classes allow the student 3 attempts at each answer, and you can set them up as open book. The computer can be much more patient than a real person can. It keeps saying in the same voice, “That’s not right, try again.” Lean towards hands-on learning material whenever you can, it reinforces the concepts. Timberdoodle offers some great hands-on kits and learning aids and they cater to special needs learners.

Photo Credit: Julia Fuller