Homeschool Curriculums
for Children with Special Needs

Most homeschool curriculums can be modified for children with special needs. If you buy a grade leveled curriculum you can buy a grade that your child can successfully do. You can also buy curriculum that matches your child's learning style.

Visual Learners

Visual learners like homeschool curriculums that have a lot of pictures. There are some math curriculum and language arts curriculum that uses pictures. Worksheets that involve matching terms to pictures would be good for visual learners. Using picture flash cards would also be a good choice.

Visual books are good to have. We used Usborne books for reference. You can find Usborne books on almost any subject. My children liked the pictures.

We also used workbooks by Milliken publishing company. The workbooks were reproducible and had colored transparencies. Most of the books are written for seventh grade to twelfth grade but you can use the transparencies with younger children.

For history of the world we used the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia. Each page has a lot of pictures.

Curriculum that uses graphic organizers would be a good choice for children who are visual learners. Graphic organizers can help children learn to write. When I was a teacher's aid I used Four Square by Judith S. Gould and Evan Jay Gould to help the children in the resource room learn to write. The book showed how to write an essay. The child writes a complete topic sentence in a center box. Then he writes three more sentences about the topic. In the last box he writes how he feels about the topic. The method can be used to teach how to write longer essays.

Graphic organizers can be used in almost any subject. Venn diagrams can be used to compare and contrast information. Graphs can be used to compare information. Webs can be used to show how information is related to each other.

Educational videos are also good for visual learners. They can be found a public libraries and the internet. I would preview the video to see if it presents your worldview.

Auditory Learners

Homeschool curriculums that use music would be good for auditory learners. Music can be used to learn facts. Most of us learned the order of the ABCs with the alphabet song when we were two or three. There are other facts that can be learned with songs.

We used a phonics tape to teach the sounds of the letters. The song went something "a, a alligator, with your big mouth open wide, put an A inside." Your child can also learn grammar rules with rhymes and songs.

Math facts can be taught with song. I have seen CDs that teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts.

Sing songs to teach geography. When we were studying US geography we sang the 50 state and capital song.

US history can also be taught with rhyme and song. Most young children learn the poem about Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492. There is a CD that teaches US history with song.

Another way to teach auditor learners is to have them listen to audio books if they are having trouble reading. They can listen and follow along in their book.

Hands-on Learning

Some children learn best by doing. There is curriculum for homeschool that has hands-on projects such as unit studies. Another good method would be Montessori Method.

If you are using more of a traditional textbooks approach you may have to add projects. You can add mulipulatives to math. There are also educational building kits for science and math.

Finding the Best Homeschool Curriculums

It is difficult to find the best homeschool curriculums especially if your child has a disability. You can make your own curriculum to suite your child's needs or modify a curriculum that you buy.

When you buy a curriculum to fit your child's learning style don't over buy. Your child may not need to sing every fact before he learns it. My son was very visual in his early learning. He needed pictures of apples and oranges to be able to add so we got him a workbook that was visual. By the next year he was able to do math with just the numbers.

There are homeschool curriculums specifically for children who have disabilities. The only one that I have used is Color Phonics. Color Phonics is for first time readers, remedial readers, and those who are learning English as a second language. It teaches 43 phonemes of the American English language with animations of the mouth. Each vowel sound is represented with a color. The program would be good for speech therapy. For my children the program took to long to teach reading.

You should fit your homeschool curriculums to you child's needs.

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