Whether you have decided to homeschool your special needs child, utilize public, or private school, you will still need to teach your child. Special needs children require much more practice and reminders to learn than “normal” children do. They take more time to complete their work. They need more assistance than other children do. What that means to the parent is, homework help all evening, every evening. Sometimes it means your child will cry with frustration. You will still be teaching your special needs child long after other children have begun to run their own lives and families.

We all know that special needs children can learn. It is just so much harder for them to grasp concepts and to retain the information. Teaching our special children can be quite a challenge. Repeatedly a parent must take the time to show or demonstrate concepts for our special needs children. I remember trying to explain a reading passage to my daughter. I could see that she just wasn’t getting it at all. We took a walk and I pointed items in the story. Finally, she understood after being able to visualize words that she did not understand.

She also had a terrible time trying to understand the concept of rhyme. To this day, I don’t think she actually hears the similarity. However, she knows that words that rhyme have the same ending, finally. Therefore, she usually gets it right now that she is 14. Usually every child can memorize better using riddles, rhymes, or information in song, but her inability to rhyme ruled out that method.

We usually have to be very methodical in teaching her a concept. To teach her to do long division, we had to draw lines and arrows every time. This helped her keep her numbers in the correct columns and reminded her to bring the next number down. Again, it was a very long process. I usually try to show her how a new concept is similar to, or related to a concept she already knows. For example, she is pretty good with money. That is the result of years of allowance and making money choices. To teach her decimals, percentages, and fractions we related them to money and she seemed to get it. For example, 50-cents is 50-percent, because .50 is ˝ a dollar.




Photo Credit: by kk+.