Educating Special Needs Children At Home

Education for Special Needs – The Sacrifice & The Benefits

I have so much respect and admiration for parents that make the committment to educate their child at home, particularly when that child requires Special Education.

Not only does it often mean that the decision for either Mom or Dad to give up working, or possibly even a career, it also means embarking on a course of challenging themselves to take on a role for which they have more than likely never been formally trained.

Homeschooling any child when you have never been trained as a teacher can be daunting enough if you have little or no understanding of what Home Educating entails, but to take on that committment when you know your child has Special Needs – and many parents must surely wonder if their best is going to be good enough – can only be seen as pretty much the ultimate demonstation of a depth of love that only a parent can have, or understand.

There are those that say that only a specially trained teacher or caregiver has the knowledge or expertise to educate and teach a Special Needs child, but I personally don’t know if I can buy into that. Surely having that level of patience that only a parent of a child can have, and having that intimate understanding of your own child’s abilities, mannerisms and personality, must play an awfully important part. 

While in some ways having other more experienced homeschoolers to turn to for advice, support and encouragement can be beneficial, I believe there can be just as many pitfalls associated with doing that. Many homeschoolers make their own homeschooling activities unnecessaily expensive, overly time consuming and cumbersome. In addition many of their experiences might well not apply in the case of a Special Needs Child.

But there is a thought I have about educating a Special Needs child at home that I find particularly exciting.

For a start I am not a believer that a child that has Special Needs is a negative. I say that because most children that are classified as having Special Needs are children that might not have a particular ability in one aspect of their own life, but more often than not they are blessed with a special talent or ability that other children don’t have. For example, how many times do we hear about an autistic child has a special musical ability, or the dyslexic child that is a potential math genius.

It is usually only the parents that will recognise that special talent or ability, and they are the ones ideally positioned to foster, encourage and help develop that special talent into something extraordinary. This is something that many Special Needs schools are generally not equipped to deal with or set up to accomplish.

One of the failings of the school system generally is that the average child is expected to study and learn a range of subjects and topics reccommended by a group of people who wrote and designed the curriculum. But those people will likely never meet your child, or know or recognise any particular talents they have. As a result those talents or skills are seldom identified or developed.

So maybe educating each Special Needs child at home should start with exploring and identifying those areas in which they might have a natural interest, or something which they enjoy and demonstrate a liking and enthusiam for. This can likely help expose those areas in which their have particular talents and abilities. That child has a potentially much better future and chance of successfully integrating into society using those special talents and abilites, than the child that is a gifted artist but who has been ear-bashed with math formulas for 5 years.

Here at Zane Education we work with many parents that are committed to educating their Special Needs children at home. Using a powerful style of Visual Learning and the most comprehensive online libray of subtitled online educational video that delivers the same curriculum content used in schools, each child is given the choice to watch, listen to or read each presentation. In other words they are enabled to process the information in the manner that best suits their individual Learning Style and abilities.

Most Special Needs children respond well to being provided with these choices, however with others it is the comprehensive variety of educational topics that we provide on subtitled video that enables them to explore with their parents and identify which particular curriculum topics interest them.

To learm more about what Zane Education offers the education of Special Needs students visit or Special Needs page, and also visit Zane’s Download page where you can freely download your Getting Started Guide and the free User Guide that best suits your particular situation.

And before going, please leave your thoughts and comments on this subject below.