Teaching/homeschooling your child with down syndrome
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you can teach your child with down syndrome home school your special needs child with success did you know your child with down syndrome can learn quickly? and you can teach him–at home–successfully. Not only was i wanting to home school a down syndrome child, i was wanting to do so on guam, an isolated island in the western pacific. Where was i to begin?
i knew enough about trisomy 21 to know early intervention would be importantin helping deborah achieve her full potential. So i put her in a government-supported early intervention program.
when it came to down syndrome, the therapists dealt in stereotypes and labels. Deborah was “high functioning” but she was still “delayed.”
they wanted me to direct the therapy, but i was clueless, so i let them lead. They approached her piecemeal, not as a whole person, and they began putting the pieces together in the wrong order
consequently, deborah did not progress. She did not talk. And could not walk. Their assessments showed that she was becomingmore delayed.
in my heart, i knew they were wrong. I knew that she was smart, but we were failing to tap into her potential.
after wasting more than two years of deborah’s life, i found an approach that addressed the real causes of her delays. Within a year she was reading and saying words; within two she was walking.
we still have a long road ahead of us, and there are many things yet to discover. But i believe that deborah will reach her …read more detail
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