I’ve met many parents who are pretty sure their child has AD/HD or some other learning challenge but they are hesitant to make it official by having their child evaluated and diagnosed. The fear that a label may limit their child, be inaccurate, or be used in discriminatory ways is valid. When my son, Josh, [...]

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“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NASB) When you are homeschooling a special needs or struggling child, you are not always on the same timeline as others. The curriculum you use needs to be adapted and usually one of the biggest modifications [...]

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My son has never had a good internal sense of time passing. When I said it was time to work on a certain subject, my son always wanted to know how long it would take and how much more work we had for the day. He also is forgetful and inattentive, so even though the [...]

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Think for a minute about taking your shoes off. Some of us remove our foot attire as soon as we enter our homes. Others may leave them on all day until bedtime. But as you picture yourself taking your shoes off, I’d like you to think about whether you take one off followed by the [...]

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I wonder how many school-age children could be considered reluctant writers. I know from my own experience and from talking with hundreds of people at homeschool conferences that reluctant writers are not uncommon. It seems to occur with a higher percentage in boys, and there’s a very high correlation in children with fine motor delays [...]

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My daughter, Beth, has grown up with an older brother and younger sister who struggle with AD/HD, auditory processing, and sensory issues. Any outsider to our family in our younger days would have been able to see immediately that two of the children were not typical in many ways. To Beth, however, she’s grown up [...]

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Bitterness. It is so easy to feel it and so hard to rid yourself of it. I guess like many things, it’s better if you can prevent it than to try to eliminate it once it’s there. When you have a child who struggles, you have a greater likelihood of being rejected or misunderstood as [...]

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Sorry for the long delay between posts. Last month we had an interesting experience. A longtime friend who is very well known among homeschoolers as well as the special needs community emailed us. She was scheduled to speak at a conference in Illinois, but her health just wasn’t good enough to allow her a long [...]

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All children forget things they’ve heard now and then, but for some children forgetfulness happens frequently and is problematic. Parents of the chronically forgetful are faced with the difficult task of trying to determine if their child is genuinely not retaining information or is being willfully non-compliant. One way to determine if memory issues are [...]

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If you have a child with learning challenges, you’ve probably wondered at times if they will ever master certain tasks. If learning is represented as a curved line, and the line curves more sharply with rapid learning, then slower learners are more accurately represented by a longer line with a gradual upward slope. Does it [...]

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