Home School For Exceptional Children
By Mimi Rothschild
Not all children develop at the same pace or in the same manner. Gifted children and children with behavioral disorders have needs above and beyond. Often children who do not adapt favorably to the classroom environment are pegged as troublemakers. Once a child is labeled in this manner, teachers tend to neglect the child instead of addressing what are actually a set of unique skills, perceptions, and needs. Home school, while not a silver bullet, is often an immense benefit for such children. In the home school, a gifted and/or special needs child can receive the extra attention and unique or accelerated approach to learning that a traditional classroom cannot provide. Home school provides an environment that lets parents and children use whatever is needed for successful learning.
Home school can be a big challenge to any parent. Children with behavioral disorders can exacerbate the challenges many parents face in presenting a home school curriculum. However, while not all days are good days, many parents of gifted children and children with behavioral disorders testify that home school helps reduce the frequency of negative behaviors and makes positive development, growth, and learning possible. Of course, home school for many of these children, especially those whose accelerated development has led to such things as acute or chronic ADHD, requires a flexible approach.
Flexibility is, fortunately, a pillar of the home school approach. Education is an interactive process, and the more involved a student is in the learning process the more they will retain. While lesson plans and basic outlines are still imperative, home school, because it is one-on-one or two-on-one, allows for freedom of intellectual movement. Since exceptional children will have good days, bad days, and everything in-between, it is much easier with a home school program to adapt lesson plans around these unpredictable shifts in attention and mood. If the child’s attention is just not present enough that day for lengthy sit-down sessions with course materials and books, an educational field trip or a change in subject is readily at hand. The course material in question can be tackled in home school the following day.
Classrooms of 20-plus students obviously must rely on rigid planning, and students who cannot stick to the plan are generally treated as discipline problems instead of exceptional children who may simply be bored with the subject or the teacher’s approach. The home school success rate with such children definitely makes home school an option many parents find worthwhile to explore.
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