Teaching children and adults with special needs at home needs to be individualized for the ultimate best outcome. During quarantine, parents and family members have to play a role as the primary teacher without having any educational aides with them.

Parents of children and adults with special needs are already some of the hardest working parents in the world, and now you have never-before-seen factors at play as well. Studies have shown that parents of individuals with special needs tend to be more resilient than others. And this is your tool against the most unforeseen parts of 2020.

Distance Learning

The Internet gives you the ability to build an online learning environment that works for your child’s specific needs. As you learn more about the way your child learns, you can add more of what’s working and subtract what isn’t. This is a valuable tool that, over time, can create a greater sense of independence for your child and even give them more freedom than they currently experience at school.

A couple of the most important aspects needed for a successful learning process for a child with special needs are planning and resources. Websites providing special education resources like online learning clipart, special education curriculum, engagement strategies, and virtual learning environments can help. Other resources include books, audio recordings of lectures, podcasts, games, toys, science projects, music, social networking support groups.

Online Special Education Schools

Teaching Special Education at home on your own can be difficult. There are schools available on the internet with experienced teachers who can make the curriculum work for your child. This way you can have a supportive and flexible system for learning and thriving at home.

If they haven’t already done so, your current physical offline school should be able to provide an Individual Education Plan (IEP) to help online teachers tailor a path for your child. 

Zoom Classrooms 

If your child needs to learn with a group of peers, individual learning may not work. Creating Zoom meetups with other parents of children with special needs can help your child maintain a sense of community by interacting with friends and other students. 

There are also a number of online Zoom classrooms designed for children and adults with special needs specific to each geographical community. One particularly interesting online classroom is Learning Pods another is Classworks, and both cater to individuals with special needs. You can use distance learning methods like this to connect your child with speech and physical therapists as well.

You can find online classrooms through physical schools, online support groups, and by contacting your Board of Education.

If your child is uninterested in screens or digital learning, you can use Zoom to speak with your child’s current educators and therapists. Zoom also allows you to record conversations and classes for playback later.

Alternative Learning Resources

Alternative or supplemental learning can provide a whole host of benefits that some traditional learning can’t. Music therapy, for instance, can improve mental health as well as physical. Music has proven to help respiration ailments, lower blood pressure, reduce heart rate, and relax muscles. 

Arts and crafts can strengthen connections in the brain that support other areas of the brain. Arts and crafts also provide chances for confidence building, bonding, life skills, fine motor skills improvement, creativity, and independent play. 

Garden therapy provides a whole host of benefits. For instance, recent studies have shown that in many cases, microbes in dirt have proven more effective than antidepressants. Gardening helps with movement, maintaining flexibility, improving wellbeing, creative thinking, calming, life skills, and confidence. Learning in or from the garden can take many forms such as growing edible foods, watering and other responsibilities, plant studies, guessing different smells, leaf art, and more. 

Finding the methods work for you and your child can take time, but it’s worth the search. We hope that the pandemic ends soon and that you can get back to your normal routines! Hang in there. Check below for more handpicked activities for individuals at all skill levels.

About Stephen’s Place

Stephen’s Place is an independent apartment community for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, located in Vancouver, WA (7 minutes from Portland, OR).

If you have a loved one with developmental or intellectual disabilities, who is looking for a community to live in, please contact us for more information. 

Stephen’s Place is a private-pay apartment community due to our state-of-the-art amenities and programs. We are a nonprofit and do not profit from our community. We are private pay because we spend more than some housing communities to ensure that our residents are comfortable and can safely live their lives with independence and dignity.