by Jen Dodrill from History at Home

 

For some people, homeschooling is synonymous with being unsocial or even antisocial. We as a collective of homeschoolers don’t know why. We know our kids are socialized. At least we try to make that happen, but what if your child has social or sensory needs and you feel like socialization isn’t happening?

In this post, I want to look at what socialization is and offer some tips for socialization for kids with social and sensory needs.

My personal experience – I’ve learned so much from my granddaughter about sensory needs. She is in therapy to learn how to adapt, and my daughter passes on what they’ve learned so that we all can work with her. Anything we can do to help my granddaughter is what we will do!

Let’s start with defining socialization.

 

What exactly is socialization?

In a paper on Home Schooling and the Question of Socialization, the author says – “What makes this question so puzzling is that different people mean different things by the word socialization. Some people mean social activity…. Others mean social influence…. And some mean social exposure…. but socialization can be more accurately defined as “the process whereby people acquire the rules of behavior and systems of beliefs and attitudes that equip a person to function effectively as a member of a particular society” (Durkin, 1995b, p. 614).”

I will not put down people that have their own ideas of what socialization is and how to achieve it, but I want to point out that the above definition is not restricted by place, time, or age. 

Socialization is truly less about activity or influence and more about equipping our children to function in their world.

Keep that in mind!

 

Direct and indirect socialization 

When our kids are small, they play alongside each other or in the same room. This is a form of indirect socialization. All children do this, but as they get older, they typically start interacting directly with their playmates.

For kids with social or sensory needs and disorders, indirect socialization is all they want, and it can be very helpful. However, if your child has social or sensory issues, you know that direct socialization can be difficult. For some it is doable with lots of cues and repetition, but for some kids it is almost crippling.

In the article 5 Tips for Homeschooling Your Child with ASD, the author says we still need to provide ways for our struggling kids to socialize – or interact – with others. Some ways they have listed include:

  • Homeschool co-op
  • Homeschool class at the zoo, museum library, etc.
  • Playing a sport, gymnastics, ballet
  • Music/choir lessons
  • VBS or other church activities

You know your child, and you either know how much to push or you’re learning! It may be a constant, on-going process. That’s okay, we are all learning.

 

Tips for socialization for kids with social and sensory needs 

Too many people can be overwhelming for many kids, and adults. Loud noises, too many lights, it adds up to overstimulation and it can happen fast! Once they’re over stimulated it’s hard to get them regulated and they might shut down or meltdown.

Some socialization tips for our kids:

  • Safe spot and person – Identify a safe spot or person for your child to go to if they’re becoming overwhelmed – my daughter always does this. Even early on, before we knew there was an issue, we did this.
  • Knowing someone there – It’s hard being the “new” kid, so knowing someone at the place or event can help lower anxiety.
  • Just being around others but not necessarily interacting – A baby step towards more direct interaction.
  • Library story times or other small groups are usually easier.
  • One person talking – This can cut down on overstimulation.
  • Give choices – Help your child to identify when they can make a choice and then offer it. You will learn if you need to push a little or a little more. For example, my granddaughter sometimes wants to order at a restaurant, but not always. She knows she has a choice.
  • Split birthday parties – Have one for friends and one for family. Holding it outside is a great idea, and even here you can assign a safe place and person.
  • Consider a lower-key holiday celebration. I have 5 kids (all grown), plus their spouses/significant others and children.  Our celebrations are always loud and busy. This can be super hard on my granddaughter, and even a couple of my kids. Be mindful of this and accommodate as you can.

 

Wrapping it up

What other people think about socialization is their business. We must equip our children to function in the world in the best way we can, while meeting their needs.

It can seem like a lot of work to teach our kids with social and sensory needs to socialize. And it is. But keep doing it! You’re learning right alongside your child.

Ask for help, look up other tips and ideas to do the best for your child. And keep in mind what your goals are for your child. No one else can define that for you. It might be helpful to seek help from someone who specializes in the sensory area, ABA or OT,  to help you define those goals and figure out exactly how to reach them.

You have a choice in how you make socialization happen!

 

Jen Dodrill has been married for 35 years, is a proud mom to 5 kids, and she homeschooled the three youngest. The “baby” graduated in May 2020, but Jen refuses to bow to empty-nest syndrome! She teaches Oral Communication as an adjunct instructor and writes curriculum under  History at Home at TeachersPayTeachers and  Boom Learning. When she’s not working, she is spending time with her kids and, adorable, granddaughters. Connect with her on her blog – Jen Dodrill History at Home , Instagram, Facebook, and her favorite place – Pinterest!

 

 

 

 

 


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By Melissa Schumacher

 

#10 – DIY Occupational Therapy Tips (https://spedhomeschool.com/diy-occupational-therapy-tips/)

Why it’s worth the read: These five hacks are budget-friendly and can make a huge difference with fine motor skills.

 

#9 – Does Your State Require Homeschool Evaluations?(https://spedhomeschool.com/does-your-state-require-homeschool-evaluations/)

Why it’s worth the read: If you live in a state that requires testing (not all do), this quick reference will help you know what to anticipate if you homeschool or are considering homeschooling.

 

#8 – 20 Holiday Special Education Homeschooling Activities (https://spedhomeschool.com/20-holiday-special-education-homeschooling-activities/)

Why it’s worth the read: We love a great list and this list was perfect for 2020’s low-key, closer-to-home Christmas.

 

#7 – Free or Inexpensive Outdoor Learning Activities (https://spedhomeschool.com/free-or-inexpensive-outdoor-learning-activities/)

Why it’s worth the read: Bookmark this page for spring! So many ideas for spending time outside. Our favorite was a visit to the Farmer’s Market!

 

#6 – Teaching Life Skills in Your Special Needs Homeschool (https://spedhomeschool.com/teaching-life-skills-in-your-special-needs-homeschool/)

Why it’s worth the read: Talking about life skills is easier than teaching life skills. How and where do you start? This quick read has a few suggestions to get started.

 

#5 – How to Write IEP Goals and Objectives (https://spedhomeschool.com/how-to-write-iep-goals-and-objectives/)

Why it’s worth the read: Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) can be used when homeschooling, too! No more long meetings, intimidating information or unclear goals. This is the second post in a series on creating homeschool IEPs.

 

#4 – 20 Adaptable Thanksgiving Homeschool Activities (https://spedhomeschool.com/20-thanksgiving-special-education-homeschooling-activities/)

Why it’s worth the read: This year, more so than other years, it was important to reflect on what we can be truly thankful for. We had fun with #2 and #8 from this list.

 

#3 – 4 Things to Prepare before Writing Your Child’s IEP (https://spedhomeschool.com/4-things-to-prepare-before-writing-your-childs-iep/)

Why it’s worth the read: The first part of starting the IEP process is getting organized. This article is the first in a series on creating homeschool IEPs. Don’t miss our new series on IEPs coming soon in 2021!

 

#2 – Fun and Motivational Homeschool Learning Ideas (https://spedhomeschool.com/fun-motivational-homeschool-learning-ideas/)

Why it’s worth the read: Both new and experienced families can struggle with keeping students motivated. These ideas are easy-to-implement for all homeschool families.

 

#1 – 30+ Free or Online Assessment Tools for Your Struggling Learner (https://spedhomeschool.com/30-free-online-assessment-tools-for-evaluating-your-struggling-learner/)

 Why it’s worth the read: Assessments do not have to be something you dread for your exceptional learner! This HUGE list of assessments was our most popular article this year for a reason. Whether you are looking to start a new curriculum or get a baseline of math or reading skills, there is a resource here for everybody.

 

 


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SPED Homeschool Team

 

Organization goes far beyond making sure everything is in its place, especially for homeschooling families who live, eat, learn, and play under the same roof every day. And, who would know better than experienced homeschooling moms who live this way 24/7? This is why we asked our team of experienced homeschooling moms to share their best homeschool organization tips that work while juggling teaching, housekeeping, and everything else going on in their lives.

 

Amy Vickrey

Making time for my spiritual life with my children has been a priority.  I am working to teach them that they have a choice regarding love, joy and their relationship with God.  To prioritize this goal, we started reading a daily devotional each night. This simple addition to our schedule has helped me remember to spend time engaging my children in God’s word and sharing time praying.  We have also added hymn singing after our devotional time. It is so sweet to hear my 3-year-old join in singing “How Great Thou Art” and “It is Well.” These precious memories will carry them and me far into the future because of this simple change I made in their bedtime routine.

For schoolwork, my oldest does his best when he can see his workload from beginning to end.  We used checklists, a clipboard, and other techniques to help him see his schedule visually. Because he can see his schedule and can to do tasks at his own pace and take breaks when needed.  In the end, he knows there is no TV time until he finishes so this acts as his reward for finishing all the tasks on his list. We also make sure to target our school time for the time of day when my son’s learning peaks.  This targeted learning time has greatly reduced daily schoolwork battles. One additional thing that helps us with school work is that I have built a therapy team with people other than myself who provide therapy sessions and work on educational (or pre-educational) goals with my children.  I let them take care of those specific skills so I can concentrate on other skills at home.

For meals, I find writing out a basic menu for each day on a calendar works best for me.  This way I will not repeat the same 3 meals my kids prefer more than I can stand, and it also allows me to plan ahead of time for expanding their palettes. This simple calendar planning also expedites the time it takes to put together my shopping lists and actual grocery shopping.

In general, balancing homeschool, work and school has been a challenge.  As a single parent, I am blessed to have a supportive family, but the majority of the responsibility still falls on my shoulders. I have found I have to stick to my schedule, make use of downtime, and not overcommit, especially on weeks bigger projects or assignments are due. 

 

Ashly Barta

I have found homeschool organization success in keeping each child’s work separate.  I use a binder for all wipe-clean pages and checklists. We use daily checklists and reverse planning to ensure we accomplish everything on our list each day.  I found that with reverse planning I have less pressure to complete all the things in a rush, we can dive deeper into the subject matter or take time for extra practice if needed.  My son has epilepsy so it allows us to take breaks when needed and I have learned to love the rest time just as much as the work time. Along with the binders we also utilize workboxes (Latchmate totes found at  Micheals) and a morning basket.  The Latchmate boxes house the main curriculum along with flashcards, pencils and whatever else my children need to complete their work.  On the other hand, the morning basket holds coloring books, a Bible, read-aloud books, and other similar materials.

 

It is amazing how implementing a few simple organizational tips can help homeschooling and a busy home life stay on track!

 

Dawn Spence

Something simple that helps me in staying organized is meal planning. My kids even help when they know what is on the menu by reminding me what meat I need to take out of the freezer so it is thawed properly. Meal planning also helps keep me keep to a budget and be thoughtful about creating healthy meals for my family. Sometimes I plan for one week, but if I am on a roll I plan two weeks out. Having a meal plan also allows me to order my groceries ahead of time, which is another big time saver. It is amazing how implementing a few simple organizational tips can help homeschooling and a busy home life stay on track!

 

Peggy Ployhar

One way I have been successful in organizing my children’s homeschooling materials is by giving them a dedicated place for their things and a yearly planning calendar.  As you can imagine over the past 17 years of homeschooling in 4 different houses as well as 2 separate times of living in our travel trailer while homeschooling, this organizational method has been thoroughly tested. My children’s spaces have ranged from tubs, shelves, drawers, and cupboards but they have always been a unique space that is just theirs to store books, projects, and the other things they use regularly for school. As for planners, I have tried many over the years, but eventually realized what worked best for us were the cheap student planners you can find at just about any store at the beginning of the school year. Each year I buy one planner for each child, making sure the cover, as well as the layout, work well for recording everything in that student’s schedule.  Then I write in lessons, a week at a time in pencil, in each planner. When my children were young, I helped them with organizing their spaces and planners, but as they moved into their junior high and high school years they took over managing almost everything, sometimes even their own weekly lesson plans!

 

Whether it is organizing your schooling materials, your homeschool spaces, your student’s schedules, or even your meals we hope our team’s homeschooling organization tips have inspired you to make one or two small changes towards being more organized in your homeschool and homeschooling family life.

 

 

 

 

 


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By Amy Vickrey, MSE

As I finish my first year of homeschool with my 6-year-old, soon-to-be “First Grader,” I am looking over the last year at all we have accomplished, and I am amazed. Just an hour or two of work most days of the week has helped him learned to read, do simple addition and subtraction, and begin into the writing process when he wasn’t even writing his name when we started. I know that even more important than meeting these goals is keeping one big goal in mind: the goal to create in my son a LOVE of learning.

I want him to become a LIFELONG LEARNER!

What does this mean? I want him to love seeking out new information and new knowledge, to never stop growing and learning. To have the tools to seek out information he wants to know.

 

Choose to Be an Example to Follow
To create a life-long learner, I must first be a lifelong learner myself. Children learn through examples. Here are some resources about how and why to become a life-long learner, even as an adult:

Why You Should Strive to Be a Lifelong Learner
Continuing to educate yourself can help you be more successful on the job and in business.

Learning is Good for Your Health, Your Wallet, and Your Social Life
Learning keeps your mind and body healthier, helps you create better spending habits and earning potential, and helps you become a better socialized and able to socialize person.

How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner
Lifelong learning develops leadership potential and helps unlock skills throughout life that are not developed in the younger years.

If you are reading this blog, you probably are or are wanting to be a lifelong learner already! As a lifelong learner myself, sometimes it is still difficult to get my child to see the bigger picture of continuing to learn and grow throughout life. So I work to equip my son with tools to help him reach this goal. These tools include:

1 – Encourage the Love of Reading
With the ability to read comes the ability to learn anything. In today’s society, I would add the ability to use a computer too. We are blessed with computers that can read to us and help us with the reading and learning process. A love of reading helps make this an enjoyable experience and a desire to reach out and learn more.

2 – Handle Mistakes as Opportunities to Learn
The simple truth is everyone makes mistakes. It’s how we react to those mistakes that define us. Learn from mistakes; learn together; show how you learn from your own mistakes and help your children learn from theirs. Natural consequences are so powerful, especially when children are young. It is so much more powerful to teach a child how they got an answer wrong than to just mark it wrong.

3 – Teach Skills on How to Find Answers
When my son asks me a question I don’t know the answer to (or sometimes I do), I show him how to look up the answer on the computer, in a book, through Google, and other resources. I let him see me asking questions about things I need to learn. How to find answers is a powerful tool. It goes along with reading and a love of reading. I may not know the answer, but I know how to find it, and how to know if my source is credible.

4 – Allow Choice in Learning
I think this is the essence of homeschooling. The ability to give children the ability to have a choice in what they are learning. At my son’s young age, this means I provide books, games, and other materials on topics he likes or might like, and I let him explore them in his free time. About the time he thinks he has exhausted the bookshelf, he finds something new to explore. We go to the library, and I let him talk to the librarian about subjects and topics he is interested in. We explore TV shows and documentaries together about topics he loves. I have learned more about dinosaurs in the last year than I thought possible. But it’s what he loves and he is learning too.

5 – Provide Time for Play
Play is such an important part of the learning process. It is when children take information and make it their own. It is when they learn to seek out answers and take chances. To read more about play check out my April blog, Learning Through Play.
 
6 – Teach Goal Setting
Setting educational goals together can be a powerful tool to get your child engaged in the learning process. Start with small goals and build to bigger goals. Maybe your goal is to write your child’s name or to identify the first letter of their name. Make the goal together, work on it together, and when you accomplish it, CELEBRATE! To learn more about goal setting and healthy habits, check out The Leader in Me, 7 Habits of Happy Kids!

7 – Make Time to Celebrate
Celebrate the successes, whether big or small! When my son first started out working on sight words, we celebrated with a trip to the ice cream shop anytime he accomplished his goal. Now he is reading almost anything he picks up! By celebrating, it helped to create excitement and enjoyment. This is an important part of the process.

I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I am!

For more information on lifelong learning, check out these links:
6 Lifelong Learning Skills
5 Steps to Developing a Lifelong Habit of Learning
10 Simple Ways to Engage in Lifelong Learning

We at SPED Homeschool also want to help you keep growing and learning. Make sure to visit our website for new articles; our YouTube channel for new videos; and our Facebook page and  support group for lots of interactive training and support so you can keep learning new ways to teach your struggling learner.

 

 


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By Kimberly Vogel

Planning a new homeschool year energizes some and sparks fear in other homeschool moms. Personally, I enjoy planning, but scheduling a year for a struggling learner reminds me of never-ending tasks such as laundry or putting away toys while a toddler dumps them out behind you… every time you get stuck on a concept, or have a medical set-back, you have to adjust your plan and schedule.

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” (Ben Franklin)

I’m not saying you’ll fail at homeschooling without a schedule, but tackling a homeschool year without an idea of what needs to be accomplished and when does create challenges.

 

8 Tips for Planning a Homeschool Year for a Struggling Learner:

  1. List the main goals in each subject for the year. Setting goals keeps your eyes on the purpose of your homeschool. Doing this in each subject allows customization based on your student’s needs.  Remember to keep your goals focused and doable. Some goals can be for mid-year with a higher expectation set for the end of the year. Goals can state how much of the curriculum you want to accomplish or an end date for completing it.  If you haven’t created an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) before, it can help with setting goals and specifying what accommodations your struggling learner needs. Check out our IEP Information page for details on how to write an IEP.
  2. Decide which lessons / topics are most important.   Some can be skipped, shortened, or combined. Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this lesson and how can we do it in a way my child will learn, be challenged, and successful?” Not all of the curriculum needs to be done, nor all of the assignments.  
  3. Plan with pencil and the ability to move things around. Schedule a rough draft or overview of what lessons need to be done by Christmas and May. If you want to write out each day’s plans in advance, keeping it on the computer in a spreadsheet provides an easy way to move things around. I’ve even planned using sticky notes.
  4. Utilize a checklist of daily subjects. Give your student a checklist of what subjects or books  need to be done each day. It can be laminated to be used weekly or daily.  This is my favorite tip for planning math. Some concepts can be combined (shapes or estimation), while some lessons might take days to work on (long division). This also helps your child feel accomplishment as they complete the tasks..
  5. Schedule in shorter chunks. Don’t plan what lessons you will do each day for the whole year;  rather plan a few weeks at a time. Rely on your goals or the overview for year-long planning.
  6. Give yourself margin. I leave an extra week unplanned each semester to give margin. If we don’t need the extra days for the important lessons we are behind in, we use that time for fun units or projects. Some years we do schoolwork on four days with Fridays for fun. This can also be used for a catch-up day.
  7. Plan backwards. Instead of writing what you think you will do before you do it, keep a file of what you do accomplished each day.This is helpful for the times you feel like you aren’t meeting goals. When we start our day stressed about what we are “supposed” to do, we forget to celebrate what we have done.
  8. Pray. This should be done first, in the middle, and last!  God knows your child and what is needed. He also knows what your year looks like, even before events happen! Through the good days, and the tough ones this year, God is not surprised. He is there every step ready to lead you.

 

Arm yourself with chocolate, pencils, calendars, lessons, and sticky notes and start planning your new homeschool year!

 

 

 

 

 


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