21 Tips for Teaching Students with Learning Differences
By Cheryl Swope
Children with various learning challenges require more intentional thought and attention whether in the home or at school. We share these 21 tips specifically for our fellow homeschooling families. In most cases, these tips were learned by our family over many years.
When I remember and follow these strategies, my children achieve more readily and contentedly. Both children, adopted twins, have ADHD, autism, speech or language difficulties, and mental illness (schizophrenia), as did their biological mother. You may know our story from Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child.
1. Be Active
Teach in short bursts, alternating between physical activities and seated activities. Low muscle tone or distracted minds can lead to fatigue. Provide movement or snack breaks to prepare students for the next activity.
2. Be Brief
Communicate your instructions clearly and speak concisely. Shorten assignments. Work toward step-by-step accomplishments. End on success.
3. Be Concrete
Ask Who?, What?, When?, and Where? questions with visual cues. Allow more advanced students to answer How? and Why? questions. Discuss these with manipulatives or illustrations to nudge students toward more abstract pondering.
4. Be Demonstrating
Use money, objects, and play-acting. Show with real apples: “Sarah has three apples. She gives two away.” Role play, illustrate, or demonstrate the actions within narrative language or word problems. Assign fewer practice items to allow extra time for demonstrations.
5. Be Engaging
Link personal interests to the topic whenever possible to promote interest. Include the student’s first and last names for speech articulation practice, in penmanship, or sentence writing, and in story problem examples.
6. Be Foolproof
“One-and-done” is not to be expected with students who have an intellectual disability or other special needs. Provide repeated practice with the lesson, preferably later in the day and throughout the year.
7. Be Giving
Give of yourself. Teaching a student with challenges is a matter of love and of art. Give tips to other caregivers, teachers, and therapists to create generous teamwork. Give generously also to your student, in quiet moments, such as a heart-to-heart talk after social difficulties, or by a deep hand massage after extensive writing.
8. Be Health-Oriented
Respect dietary, olfactory, or allergic sensitivities and difficulties with impulse control. Secure unsafe items and provide safe boundaries. Know and anticipate a student’s temptations. Give space for movement. Review and update notes regarding the student’s physical and medical challenges.
9. Be Incremental
Give the “big picture” but also break lessons down into small steps, whether shoe-tying or long division. Allow for mastery before introducing next steps and review mastered steps until they are integrated into the whole. See SimplyClassical.com.
10. Be Judicious
Give encouragement to students who need it, but avoid indulging with reward or praise for minimal effort. Expect students to rise to the standard of becoming increasingly diligent, thoughtful, and self-governing.
11. Be Kind
Watch how you respond to a struggling child. The child himself – and any child overhearing – will witness how you react. When handled with kindness, such moments can encourage students to imitate gentleness.
12. Be Lasting
Whether you teach one hour a week or every hour of every school day, remember the lasting impact of overcoming your own resentment, trials, and inconveniences to give a student nourishment for both body and soul.
13. Be Masterful
When possible, craft the day as you would a work of art. This may require periods of rising early or reflecting late. Whenever you fall short, refresh, recover, and begin again.
14. Be Need-Aware
Provide time in your school day to teach the necessities, such as washing hands, eating neatly, using a napkin, speaking politely, and other daily needs. Allow a quiet area for sensory load reduction and calming as needed.
15. Be Observant
Notice early signs of the need to become more vigilant, more flexible, more compassionate, more matter-of-fact, or more directive. Observation and prevention can be far more effective than merely reacting.
16. Be Persistent
Do not give up. Teaching takes time. For example, reading cannot be reduced to memorization of sight words, so persevere with phonics instruction and practice. Sometimes, as the child matures, lessons become easier to grasp and to integrate into reading, spelling, or writing.
17. Be Questioning
Ask the student to show or paraphrase your instructions. Pause to ask simple “repeat-back” questions during your lesson. Use simple recitation to accustom students to question answer format for both pragmatic and academic language.
18. Be Reasonable
Set expectations to expand rather than outstrip the student’s capabilities. Reasonable requests respect honest struggles and engender willingness to persist in the effort.
19. Be Supportive
Consult physical and occupational therapists for seating or writing support such as a slant board, sloped desk, foot wedge, textured cushion, slate, mini whiteboard, or other physical and therapeutic aids.
20. Be Transition-Minded
Assist students with transitions. Post picture schedules with clear left-to-right or top-to bottom sequences. Review these. Use the same words “first, next, then, last” each time to impart predictable order and to promote smooth transitions.
21. Be Undaunted
Teaching special needs can be daunting, but preparation eases the challenge. Enlarge print from workbooks, design flip charts to accompany recitations, or create a wall number line for demonstrations. Be undaunted, if only because of your love for the student.
You are more qualified than you think.
AUTHOR
Cheryl Swope
Cheryl Swope, M.Ed., has a master’s degree in special education (behavior disorders and learning disabilites) and is the author of Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child (Memoria Press). Her Simply Classical Curriculum is consistently voted “#1 for Special Learners” by homeschoolers and has received numerous Excellence in Education awards (SimplyClassical.com). Cheryl and her husband homeschooled their adopted twins from the children’s infancy through graduation. The family lives in a quiet lake community in southeast Missouri. www.memoriapress.com.
Copyright 2023, The Old Schoolhouse®. Used with permission. All rights reserved by the Author. Originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the trade publication for homeschool moms. Read The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com, or download the free reader apps at www.TOSApps.com for mobile devices. Read the STORY of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine and how it came to be.
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