Why I Chose to Partially Homeschool
I am not a naturally born homeschooler – the thought of it definitely scared me at first. It scared me until I had a bigger fear: I realized the only way my younger son would receive the instruction, accommodations, and neurodivergent-affirming learning environment he needed would be if I homeschooled.
My older son decided to homeschool after his freshman year of High School, and homeschooling for high school with dyslexia is a different animal than homeschooling for elementary school, and I will go into detail on that at the end of this page (Skip ahead if you are only interested in hearing about our experience homeschooling for dyslexia in high school).
I began homeschooling my younger son half-way through his 4th grade year, after an IEP meeting when I learned the special education teacher would be using “Touch Math” curriculum with him, thereby negating and opposing all the the work I had done with him thus far using authentic multi-sensory math methods by Ronit Bird. I had been tutoring him after school for about 30-minutes twice a week for a few months and he told me that he wanted to be homeschooled. He said, “Everything I’ve learned about math, I’ve learned from you.” I was shocked. How could I, an untrained teacher, actually teach him more math in an hour a week for a few months then he had had learned in 4 years of elementary school? So, I listened to him and decided to trust the results we had seen so far using multi-sensory math games and activities and we started to homeschool.
I don’t feel like an expert homeschooler, nor would I ever claim to be an expert homeschooler, and I also have no regrets about embarking on the homeschooling journey. I have learned quite a bit alongside my son, and my son has had the space and time to grow into who is, and develop his math skills and confidence, without the often overwhelming and demoralizing neurotypical institutional demands of public school.
He is entering 8th grade next year and wants to return to public school. He feels ready and wants to enjoy having a teenage social life among his peers and having different teachers who are not his mother or father (yay!). So another journey begins for us next Fall.
Advantages of homeschooling for dyslexia:
- You don’t have to repeatedly ask for accommodations to be implemented by teachers or admin. You give whatever accommodations your child needs by default, you don’t need permission from anyone else.
- You can use evidence-based curricula.
- You can move at your child’s own pace.
- If your child has ADHD or gets exhausted easily due to working memory/processing strain, you can do 15 minute sessions for difficult subjects. They will learn more in that one-on-one individualized 15-minute lesson when they are attentive, then if you dragged it on for an hour and they won’t fight against the subject, knowing it’s gong to be short.
- You don’t have to assign homework or stay up late with them doing homework through tears and exhaustion.
- You don’t have to give “tests” and can avoid test anxiety. You can simply do “assessments” where you use the test from the curriculum to see whether you, as the teacher, spent enough time on a subject, for your child to do well on the assessment or if you need to review more.
- You never have to give a timed test.
- Your child will have plenty of time and energy left for their special interests using their dyslexic strengths.
- You can use charter homeschool funds to buy amazing special interest classes that would never be offered at traditional public schools.
Disadvantages of homeschooling for dyslexia
- You are now the teacher! Your child’s learning outcomes depend on you and your curricula choices vendor class choices, and implementation (with great freedom comes great responsibility 🙂 ) …and you will later see this is actually an advantage, but at first it does feel a bit scary to take on this new role if you are new to homeschooling.
Fortunately there are plenty of tried and true curriculum choices that are dyslexia-friendly and evidence-based. There are homeschooling and dyslexia parent support groups online/on social media, and sometimes in-person groups in our communities.
Homeschool Curriculum for Dyslexia
I want to share links to the curriculum I’ve used with my son that I found dyslexia-friendly, dyslexia-specific, or even easily modifiable to accommodate his needs. There are already blogs out there by seasoned homeschoolers with dyslexic children who have tried many more curricula than I have, so this is not a comprehensive list of all curricula out there for homeschooling with dyslexia, just the ones I’ve used in real life (un-sponsored links) and have enjoyed using for homeschool.
Reading/ Spelling
Barton (I am a Certified Barton tutor) and I now also use Structured Linguistic Literacy methods that I’ve learned through EBLI training when working with my kids. I also used some Structured Word Inquiry methods, morphology activities, and morphology word games (and this book and one more game).
Writing/Composition
We started with IEW (recommended by Susan Barton after students complete Level 4 of Barton), and I appreciated the program methodology; however, because my son has dysgraphia, he found the recopying/handwriting cumbersome. There are online and in-person tutors/teachers who teach individual or group classes using the IEW method to homeschooled children.
We switched to methods and lesson plans from “The Writing Revolution” (TWR) book and free resources on the TWR website (recommended by Sally Shaywitz, author of Overcoming Dyslexia), and a modifiable curriculum based on TWR methods created by teachers at a private school for dyslexic students in Chicago (Redwood Literacy school), curriculum found here on Teacher Pay Teachers. I could modify the Redwood Literacy TWR lessons for whatever subjects we were studying in science, history, or literature for my son.
In our last year of homeschool for 7th Grade, we used the Oak Meadow English curriculum and I found that easy to use, thorough, and easily modifiable to review Barton spelling rules, and I loved the literature selections (I read aloud or we listened to the audiobook together). Did I make my son do all the essay writing assignments in the curriculum with dyslexia and dysgraphia? No. We chose subjects he was interested in and focused more intensely on those using Oak Meadow and “The Writing Revolution” methods for paragraph and essay writing. My son also completed writing assignments on a computer with the option of using speech-to-text and practiced typing with the Keyboarding Without Tears program (typing is an important skill for those with dysgraphia and dyslexia). Because he was typing, he could also use the Grammarly add-on for chrome to help with spelling. For subjects with short answer questions in workbooks that I didn’t not have time to convert to online files, I was his scribe and and just copied down what he dictated.
Math
I’ve used several multi-sensory math curricula and I cannot choose a favorite as they have all added to my knowledge and toolkit for teaching math conceptually to students struggling with math or who have math anxiety – I honestly wish I had been taught math using these methods (and I’m not dyslexic, and excelled in math in high school and college), so don’t be afraid to use these with non-dyslexic children – they will only reinforce and strengthen numeracy skills and a love of math.
I recommend Ronit Bird’s print books and e-books, The Dyscalculia Solution book, Singapore Math Dimensions or Primary Mathematics, Math with Confidence (Grades 1 and 2 available now). Watching Math Antics videos (and a few other youtube videos that are multi-sensory) before starting a Singapore Math lesson on fractions, decimals, mean/median/mode, ratios, rates, (and other middle school math topics) has also been extremely helpful.
The most important thing to remember when using a math curriculum with dyslexic students is SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN CONCRETE and PICTORIAL stages of teaching/learning. I think the habit among most of us from what we learned in school is to gloss over the multi-sensory concrete activities at the beginning of a Singapore Math lesson and move straight to abstract paperwork. This is the crucial step for dyslexic students. It might feel like you are just “playing games” or “showing the obvious” – and guess what, that’s exactly what they need because it’s not “obvious” to them when looking at a math problem full of abstract symbols they must decode and associate with a real-life quantity, and playing games is the best (and fastest and most fun) way to learn.
History
Story of the World, Pandia Press History Odyssey, and Oak Meadow (I read aloud from the books, we watched videos and documentaries, and modified writing assignments when needed, using The Writing Revolution templates/graphic organizers, free on their website.)
Science
Pandia Press Real Science Odyssey, and Oak Meadow Science
Special Interest Classes
Charter homeschools have a list of Vendors on their website who offer classes that can be paid for with homeschool funds. My son loved classes at Urban Workshop (like 3D Printing because they were hands-on and technical, which are some of his dyslexic strengths. There are coding classes, Minecraft classes, archery, dance, theater, art , music, and languages, as well as all the academic subjects available through homeschool charter vendors and Outschool.
Homeschooling for Dyslexia in High School
After my eldest son’s freshman year at a charter magnet arts high school, we decided to homeschool for the remainder of high school. He made some great friends and had a few great teachers with shared interests at the school; however, it was not a dyslexia-supportive environment (the school did not even have a Special Education department and was later sued by the school district), the days were very long and the homework was very long and I watched my son slowly descend into constant stress and fatigue. Additionally, the math program was horrendous: a “self-discovery/self-guided” common core curriculum where the teacher did not teach, instead the students were supposed to teach themselves or teach each other new concepts in groups. A major failure for dyslexic students who need explicit, structured, guided, and multi-sensory instruction methods.
Once I talked to the math teacher about multi-sensory methods and how they could help all students learn but are especially needed by dyslexic students, and so the next day she handed my son a tub of colorful polygon tiles and told him he could use them to solve algebraic expressions since he was dyslexic – the teacher did not demonstrate, model, or show in any way how to use them, just handed him the tub of tiles and walked away (insert giant parental long sigh/groan here).
And so our homeschooling for dyslexia in high school began the next year.
Because high school has more rigorous reporting and class accreditation requirements, it’s a different experience than homeschooling for elementary school which is very flexible. There are different tracks (no college, community college, 4-year college) and different requirements for each track. We chose the community college track for these reasons:
- Avoid overly rigorous and competitive classes with lots of busy work that would cause burnout before even getting to college
- Avoid AP tests (stress and unnecessary if you take community college classes while in high school – more details below)
- Avoid excessive foreign language requirements for immediately matriculating to a 4-year university (learning new languages can be hard for many dyslexics)
- Community Colleges have great teachers for undergraduate breadth requirements, who pay attention to beginning students more than professors at 4-year universities whose main priorities are upper-division and graduate students and their own research and “publish or perish” demands (I learned this first hand by attending a 4-year university right out of high school)
- Community colleges are much more affordable than 4-year universities, so it makes sense/cents to attend the first two years at a CC (and get more attention and great teaching from CC professors for less money), and then transfer to a 4-year university for the last two years.
Once we had decided on my son’s track, we then decided what classes (and where) my son would take all of the courses required to graduate high school. It was a bit of smorgasbord approach: he had some online classes through the charter school high school vendors, some classes we taught at home using approved textbooks/curriculum from our charter homeschool, and some classes he took at our local community college while in High School. THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART: community college classes are free for high school students...but wait, that’s not even the best part: EVERY SEMESTER OF HISTORY, ENGLISH, MATH, SCIENCE, or LANGUAGE that a high school student takes at Community College counts for ONE FULL YEAR of high school credit in that subject, AND COUNTS TOWARD COLLEGE BREADTH REQUIREMENTS. Yes, double dipping, for free. So my son took one community college class each semester of high school and ended up graduating a year early from high school because of each community college semester class counting for a full year of a high school class. WHAT A WONDERFUL (AND FREE) WAY to avoid the stress and cost of AP classes, while still getting college credit. My son liked his community college professors the curriculum, and the workload much better than what he experienced at the charter arts high school.
Another advantage of using community college for some high school course requirements is that the disability services (special education dept.) at the community colleges he attended were accommodating and helpful for his needed extra time on tests, formula cards and how to communicate accommodations to professors. He has his own counselor in disability services and gets priority registration. A whole different world for me as a parent used to fighting for accommodations in grade schools and high schools. This experience also taught my son to advocate and communicate with professors since parents are not even allowed to contact professors/teachers directly since the students is the one enrolled (the customer). I sat in on some counseling meetings while he was in high school and brand new at this, but the focus was always on my son and his needs and him communicating with the counselors.
Now that he has graduated high school, he attends the same community college as a full-time student finishing his breadth requirements to transfer to a UC (University of California school, a 4-year college), which is quite common. If you are a California resident, the first two years of community college are FREE and you receive free financial aid for books, supplies, and transportation expenses. So my son has been attending community college classes for the past three years, and we have only paid a $30 health fee each semester.
Obviously, this path will not work for all dyslexic students: some students want to stay with their friend group through high school and some students want to be involved in high school team sports, but if those are not major concerns for your child, and they enjoy learning in a mature environment where they don’t have to ask permission to go to the bathroom and are comfortable among intergenerational classmates online or in-person, then this option could help them, as it did my son.