This page is basically a copy of our very first post. But since, in time, it will be buried under many other posts, I’m duplicating it here. It explains why my wife and I started writing this blog. Here goes:
The purpose of this blog is to share ideas about how to best home school kids with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
My wife and I are not parents. However we home school my 12-year old brother-in-law, Steven. We found we had to take him out of a charter school two years ago since he wasn’t learning anything there. We spoke to the teachers about the fact that he has ADD, but the only feedback we received from them were notes saying he’s having trouble paying attention and was misbehaving. I felt like asking them if they remembered our conversations, and who was not paying attention those times. It was frustrating. They didn’t seem to have any solutions.
I think most teachers are not trained as to how to teach ADD kids. Then again, even if they are, typical classrooms are not the best environments for children with ADD. Since the main problem that ADD kids have is focusing on one thing, being in a classroom with 20 or so other children is extremely distracting for them. Even when he received several hours a day of special education with only 3 other kids present, he was distracted by the movements and actions of those 3 children.
A couple of years ago, at 10 years old, Steven could only read short words like “cat”, “dog”, “to”, “the”, etc. He couldn’t make it through full sentences, and if he did, it took so long to read a few sentences that it bored him out of his wits.
To us, the solution seemed simple: take him out of school and teach him ourselves. His parents are older and couldn’t do it, so we run a one-student school, so to speak.
How do we do it and still work, maintain a home and have a “life”? What methods have we found best for homeschooling Steven? What ideas have we tried that failed? What frustrations have we faced and how do we manage to stay sane? These are all questions that we will answer throughout this blog. At the same time we hope to get comments from readers. Sharing all of our experiences, knowledge and research together, I’m sure we will find the most effective ways to teach ADD kids at home.
Oh, and by the way, it’s working.