Top 10 Tips for homeschooling families with slow learners

1. Be grounded firmly in your reasons to homeschool. When a lack of progress or other frustrations come, dealing with vacillations on whether or not to home school will not muddy the waters.

2. Be open minded enough to try other methods of learning if what you are implementing is not working. Don’t grind it out day after day, hoping for a sudden break through. A different approach can make all the difference in understanding.

3. Stay organized enough to be able to present the same information in different, "hopefully enlightening" ways. We become the master of interesting repetition.

4. Help your child succeed at something they are interested in. Music, art, home making skills, auto mechanics, animals... and as they get older, something that they can rely on later in life to possible make a living at.

5. Make school work just a part of your child’s life, instead of the main event. This places the emphasis in life not on their failure or slow learning, but just a part of their lives they need to work on.

6. Educate yourself, as a parent, on your child’s learning difference. Which methods of learning help them to remember information? Get hooked up with other parents with children that learn differently also. Ask them what they use.

7. Read some great books on learning disability such as:

• A. Strategies For Struggling Learners, A Guide For The Teaching Parent By Joe Sutton, Ph.D and Connie Sutton, M.A. Ed.

• B. Helping Children Overcome Learning Difference A Step-By-Step Guide for Parents and Teachers By Jerome Rosner.

• C. The Parents Guide to Learning Disabilities by McCarney and Bauer. Hawthorne Educational Services (1-800-542-1673)

8. Use testing with caution. Find a homeschool friendly professional that believes in what you are doing. A good book such as Informal Tests For Diagnosing Specific Reading Problems By Stephen A. Pavlak, Ph.D. will go a long way to helping you find answers to your child’s needs.

9. Be careful that character development stays number one in priority. So much can be accomplished when our children are ready and willing to learn. An "I can’t" attitude or "I won’t succeed" approach will hamper them more than the learning difference, itself.

10. Work on things together as a family. Put your slow learners in charge of teaching younger siblings. Teaching others has a funny way of cementing information, and keeps them focused. Remember, our learning disabled children are just what we make them... incompetent students, or responsible young adults.