A Practical Guide for Preschool/Elementary Years | Guest post by Serena Spoelma
I recently had an Instagram post about homeschooling children with special needs, and got some wonderful comments from mothers who are faithfully tending these sweet children at home. Serena reached out about sharing her homeschool experiences with her son with Down Syndrome, and I was excited to share it with you!
You have decided you want to homeschool your child with Down Syndrome. What now? When I first
started homeschooling my child with Down Syndrome, I found very little practical guides on the ins and
outs of the actual schooling. Even though I had been homeschooling my typical son and had a good
rhythm in place for that, the global delays and challenges my younger son faced led me to feeling very
overwhelmed and not sure where to begin. My son had gross motor, fine motor, speech and feeding
delays along with medical challenges and many appointments with specialists. The practical aspects of
that and the day-to-day challenges made it very difficult to know how to add in academics in addition to
meeting his other daily needs and the practice he needed with them. These are some of the things I
have learned in homeschooling during these early years.
First: Identify the benefits of homeschooling your child as they pertain to your child and your family
situation. For our family, homeschooling provided a safe and loving environment for our child to learn
and grow. We could manage his daily health needs and make necessary medical appointments without
worrying about missing school days. We could help him with his feeding and potty training needs. We
could take sick days when needed through long, extended illnesses and recovering from necessary
surgeries. Our child could learn at the pace and in the way he needed to learn. We could make the
necessary accommodations for him and set up our home in a way to help him succeed without long IEP
meetings. We could teach our child to handle change as well as teaching important math and reading
skills. We could help our child, who has additional sensory challenges, socialize and begin to build
connections with others, but also take breaks when he needed to. I love this quote by Jen Dodrill taken
from the article “Tips For Socializing Kids with Social and Sensory Needs”: “We must teach our children
to function in the world in the best way we can, while meeting their needs.” Homeschooling allows our
family to be able to do this. Most importantly of all, we can teach our son that God is the Creator of the
world and loves him and has a special plan for his life.
Establish and write down long-term and short-term goals for your child. For example, long-term goal: Be able to read and write. Short-term goal: recognize and be able to match letters “A” “B” and “C”. Long-
term goal: Develop an appreciation for literature and arts. Short-term goal: Recognize and be able to match the letters of his name. Long-term goal: Be able to communicate with others verbally. Short-term
goal: Say single words with prompting such as “please” when he wants his daily smoothie. Long-term
goal: be able to write. Short term goal: work on fine motor skills to strengthen fingers with playdough,
blocks, and different fine motor games. My hope is a few examples of things we are working on can help
you recognize and establish long term goals and break them down into smaller short-term goals that will
incrementally lead to accomplishing the long-term goals. I personally found identifying and breaking
down these goals to be a skill I had to develop in my first few years of homeschooling my child, and I
would have appreciated some practical help in learning how to do that. Please note that the goals for
your child will be highly individualized, and the goals I am sharing may not be goals you have for your
child. That is one of the many beauties of homeschooling, it can be tailored exactly to your child’s
needs/abilities.
Consider using board games to help your child with Down Syndrome learn during these early years. We
have used the game Hi Ho Cheerio to work on taking turns, pincer grasp, counting, and basic adding and
subtracting. My son loves the game Kerplunk and we use that to work on fine motor skills, counting
marbles, and taking turns. We have used Zingo for vocabulary building and matching, and Chutes and
Ladders, Trouble, and Monopoly for counting, math, and learning about money. One of my son’s
favorite games is Banana Blast, and it has helped him so much this past year with the fine motor work of
“push” and “pull” along with adding and taking away. We played Pop the Pig to develop skills of
counting and pushing (you push the pig’s head “down” after you put in the hamburgers). This was a
difficult skill for my son to master with his hypotonia, and this game was very motivating for him.
Find an academic curriculum that will help you meet your child’s short-term and long-term academic
goals. We use the parent led Abeka phonics program for our reading work, and I use the book Fine
Motor Skills in Children with Down Syndrome for help with developing the fine motor skills my son will
need to learn to write. For our other academics, we do Bible and use the program Five in a Row for
literature-based unit studies. Visual learning is a skill for most individuals with Down Syndrome, and this
curriculum utilizes high quality picture books for its family unit studies that expose my son to literature
with pictures. Along with literature, this curriculum allows us to work on history, vocabulary, art, math,
geography and language arts, and is a curriculum that both my sons, who are at very different
developmental levels, can do together. Some books we have enjoyed reading out loud this past school
year during these unit studies include: “Down, Down the Mountain”, Jan Brett’s “The Nutcracker”, “The
Glorious Flight”, “Mirette on the High Wire”, “Cranberry Thanksgiving”, “Another Celebrated Dancing
Bear”, “The Rag Coat”, and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”.
A common question I am often asked by new moms beginning to homeschool their child with Down
Syndrome is “How can I get my child to focus?” Building focus or attention in your child is a great place
to begin when you are beginning your homeschool. Identify that as one of your long-term goals, and
then identify some short-term goals that will help you build this muscle. Some practical suggestions:
Begin first with a preferred activity for your child before moving on to a less preferred activity. If your
child loves playdough, sensory bins, and puzzles pick one of those to start with each day and rotate
them daily, before moving on to a less preferred activity such as read aloud time or phonics work. When
my son began homeschooling he would tolerate 10-15 minutes a day. I was so surprised the other day
when I realized my son had been engaged and focused for over an entire hour. We had been having so
much fun together learning, I completely forgot a movement recess, and he didn’t request one. What a
celebration my husband and I had when we discussed it later that evening!
Lastly, consider how you can incorporate nature into your child with Down Syndrome’s homeschool. My
husband and I see getting out in the woods with our children to be a wonderful family activity. We see
nature as helping our child with his emotional regulation. He has the biggest smile on his face during
family walks. He loves when we reach a familiar place at the creek to throw rocks. I recall a day spent
with my sons this past summer at a swimming hole at the end of a long hike. I watched my son with
Down Syndrome turn the big slabs of rock into his own personal “slide” into the water with the happiest
of laughs. Other things we enjoy in nature include looking for pinecones, pretty leaves, and different
wildflowers. We climb over big boulders next to the hiking trail. We smell the fragrance of pine needles.
My son loves to pick up sticks or leaves or find a grassy section next to the trail where he just relaxes
and looks around. If your child likes to write or draw, bring a nature journal along and see what inspires your child and what they want to include inside. The physical exercise and the time spent observing and
in wonder will bring delight to your homeschool.
In conclusion, this article specifically addressed homeschooling your child with Down Syndrome, but
many of the principles in here can be applied to children of varying abilities. I wish you the best as you
begin this journey of homeschooling your child with special needs. With God’s help, you can do it and
your child and your family can thrive!
Related post: Homeschooling Special Needs Children
Read the Special Needs chapter in my book, Anyone Can Homeschool
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