Faith will share diagnostic checklists for struggling learners, common roadblocks homeschooling parents face, and help you navigate around those, as well as share strategies for success with your children who learn differently. In addition, she will provide an overview of HSLDA’s Struggling Learner/Special Needs Department and the many resources they provide to both members and non-members.

This workshop offers practical resources, lists of materials, and curricula in order to help equip you as you work with a struggling learner in your home school. Multi-sensory teaching methods, direct instruction, modeled teaching, and “scaffolding” instruction are shared, as well as ideas for designing a unique home instruction program tailored to your child’s specific challenges.

This workshop addresses some of the challenges associated with homeschooling struggling or atypical learners in the high school years. Do you have questions such as, “How do I award my child with special needs a diploma?” or “What do I do since my child with dyslexia can’t read typical high school level material?” Faith discusses alternative course work, specialized curricula and learning materials, assistive technology, transcript options, possible graduation guidelines/high school programs for special learners, post-high school options, as well as offer tips for navigating the process of applying for testing accommodations for the college boards.

In this session, Faith will discuss the ultimate goal of reading instruction, which is comprehension, and will explore various types of thinking and processing skills required for proficient comprehension. Tips, techniques, and strategies will be shared on how to develop very young children’s vocabulary and good habits of mind in order to lay a solid foundation for comprehension with our wee ones, ages birth to five.

Does your child have a learning disability or perhaps severe special needs? Have you pulled your child out of public school where he used to have an IEP (individual education plan)? Participants will learn the purposes and benefits of writing an SEP, student education plan, the homeschool version of an IEP. This workshop also provides guidance in how to draft an SEP. Participants will look at sample student education plans, receive a template of a Student Education Plan, and a resource list of books that will assist them in drafting their own homeschool student education plan.

Faith will define what dyslexia is (and what it is not), discuss the different types of dyslexia as well as levels of struggle (mild, moderate, severe), and then offer hope by sharing the types of necessary teaching methods, specific, research-based interventions and programs that can be implemented in homeschool setting. Hope and encouragement are offered, in addition to right brain “tricks” and strategies for success to add to your teaching toolkit!