Parents can become aware of their child’s lack of progress from report cards, meetings with teachers, standardized test results, or even helping with homework. It’s a terrible feeling to realize that your child isn’t learning as well as is expected, particularly when you may not have been previously aware of it. 

A failure to progress academically can have multiple causes, of course, but there are a few things that parents and professionals in the field of education need to keep in mind. The curriculum that master plan implemented by schools and mandated by states is not written, designed, and implemented for YOUR child. This massive plan, which dictates the scope of what is taught and in what order it is taught, is not aimed at any particular student but rather designed to reach some overall goals far removed from specific students. 

Students, including your child, vary enormously in their ability to process information and utilize that information in any way. Although the concepts of visual and auditory learners, for example, are often over-simplified, there are real processing differences among students in every class, in every school. What your child is able to learn and retain out of what is being presented is based on his or her ability to take in what is being presented and store it in a way that can be recalled. 

So, although schools have this massive curriculum designed with no particular student in mind at all, your student may not be equipped to learn it. In other words, this may well be the wrong curriculum and instructional approach for your child. In fact, your child might be able to do an outstanding job of learning, given another approach and a different type of curriculum. Too often, schools function like the military. We have this institution with this structure and this agenda. Your child must fit in and learn to meet expectations. 

Consider that the issue may not be caused by a flaw in your child but rather by flaws in how this system is imposing itself on your child. No school can fully individualize what they do. Even students with IEPs don’t actually get their own curriculum but rather a slowed-down, abbreviated version of the overall curriculum. Homeschooling provides a solution, of course, as long as the parent does not simply replicate the errors the schools have made. Improving how a child processes information allows the child to learn from a wider array of instructional styles and permits the child to learn with less effort.

NACD is here to help your child improve his or her processing and also design a truly child-specific learning plan that paves the way for successful and rapid learning. 

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 39 No. 3 , 2025 ©NACD

The post Is the Problem My Child or the Curriculum? appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

We are often asked, “What does a day doing NACD Home-Based Education look like?” Let’s see if we can help you get the picture. The truth is, the picture looks different for every family and almost constantly changes. Every child and every family are different and so are most days. A typical day for a child with a brain injury is going to look dramatically different from that of a child on the autism spectrum, as it is from a child with a behavior/compliance issue, or a learning or attention problem, or a typical child. And the typical day of a preschool child is much different from that of a teen. The other significant variables involve the family’s situation. Who is home and how much time do they have to assist? Is mom home, does she have the day “free,” or is she working from home for part of the day? Is Dad available, or Grandmother or Aunt Susie? The nice thing about creating Targeted Home-Based Developmental and Educational programs is that each and every program is designed and modified based on the child’s and family’s needs. There is nothing close to one-size fits all anything. In fact, NACD Home-Based Educational programs don’t even need to be accomplished at home. More than a year of each of my two sons’ NACD Home-Based Educations were conducted at our NACD offices.

One of the very valuable things I have learned after 50 years of working with children and families is that we have to start with a vision. Your vision defines your goal and your direction and helps establish the road map to get there. When it comes to education, most parents are working from the perspective of their memory of school, which tends to establish their vision of what education is—it becomes the vision. Since most of us attended school, our vision of education is school, with all the good and bad elements. For most of us it’s difficult to create a vision of something that we haven’t experienced. For those who take the leap and decide to homeschool, it’s not surprising that the vision of homeschool is a replication of “school,” just without the big building. It involves lots of curriculum, lots of “work,” and lots of time per day spent on curriculum, not much fun, not much excitement about learning, and not much of an opportunity to target and individualize. “No pain, no gain,” right? No, not right!

In this article I’m not going to go into all that I believe is wrong, illogical, ineffective, negative, and virtually self defeating about “education” as it has become; but for the moment let’s create a new, a different vision of what can be. Let’s meet the Thompsons and their daughter, Katie.

As you follow Katie through her day, it may sound like she is the “perfect” child. At this point in her story, she is actually pretty close to the ideal, and most parents would give their right arm to have such a child. A nice vision! But as you read about her typical day, I would like you to realize that most of our “Katies” did not start off as this Katie is today, nor did most of our parents start off as the Thompsons are today.

Our typical Katie comes to us at about age seven with a variety of issues. She is pulled out of second grade or starts with us at the end of a terrible year in school. Our typical Katie (or Tommy) generally has processing issues and the global maturity of children closer to five than eight. She is not doing at all well academically or socially and behaviorally. She hates reading and math, wouldn’t know a chore if it jumped up and bit her, and is generally a very unhappy camper.

Typically, Katie’s parents are frustrated, and the vision they have of their child’s future is not pretty. They have bought into “more is better” and “no pain, no gain” and push the academics really hard; and it just gets more and more ugly and more negative by the day. The primary thing that Katie is learning is that she hates it all, that she is stupid, and life stinks. To turn this all around, step two after we create a new vision, is to educate and guide the parents so that we can turn their heads around. And we can.

Certainly not all families who come to us wanted to home educate because their child has issues; many come because they want to help their child excel. But for those families whose children have issues, the plan is to be proactive not reactive.

Being proactive, we are mindful of the vision, of where we want to go, and we understand that we need to put together the pieces to get there. If we are reactive we get it backwards. “Johnny is way behind in reading so we are going to read more and more.” No! That only reinforces everything that is wrong and broken and leads to bad outcomes. Proactive often means that you take a step back, identify the issues that created the problem in the first place, address those issues, and start the process by going very slowly and gently, and in tiny short sessions go about teaching Johnny to like, then love, reading, math, etc.

Catch up is easy once we have identified the issues affecting learning, and we’ve addressed them and are working to develop a strong foundation and create a positive environment and are turning the child into an active participant. Then we start moving into excellence.

The proactive plan requires steps:

Step 1 – Create a new vision.

Step 2 – Educate the parents and create a new perspective.

Step 3 – Identify any underlying issues.

Step 4 – Proactively address issues and develop a strong foundation for learning.

Step 5 – Create a learning environment that is conducive to teaching the child to love learning.

Step 6 – Work to put the whole package of the whole child together. See education as much more than curriculum.

The Thompson family has two children. Katie is eleven and her little brother, Max, is five. Let’s take you through Katie’s day.

A Day in the Life of Katie Thompson

7:00 a.m.

Katie’s alarm goes off. She gets out of bed, takes care of herself in the bathroom, and after her shower picks out her clothes for the day, dresses, makes her bed, and tidies her room.

7:30

Katie lets Scout, the family dog, out and starts preparing breakfast of scrambled eggs for the family. She gets the table set, brings Scout in, feeds him, and gives him fresh water.

7:50

Breakfast is ready, and the family joins her at the table and enjoys their breakfast. They talk about their plans for the day.

8:30

Katie has cleared the table, put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and cleans the kitchen counters. Katie, Max, and Mom head out for their morning walk/run.

9:00

They return home, and while Max does his morning dust buster search for whatever dirt, dog hair and bugs he can find on the floor and then tides his room, Mom works with Katie on some of her cognitive/processing activities (that are now at very high levels). Then following a protocol designed for her, they together read a short two-page non-fiction article that is targeted at her reading comprehension level of ninth grade and discuss the vocabulary and the story—short, sweet, and interesting.

9:30

Katie works on her typing. She is typing at 45 wpm and wants to hit 50 by the end of the month. She likes writing stories and knows that the faster she can type, the easier it is to get her thoughts down on paper. She has learned that she is getting pretty good at writing stories. The typing takes ten minutes and then she spends some time working with Max on his reading and math programs. Five year-old Max is already reading at a third grade level and starting multiplication with the NACD math program. Most of Max’s specific activities only take a couple of minutes each and are separated by a minute or two of physical activities like hopping and skipping, part of Max’s targeted physical program.

10:00

Katie checks her daily chore list and begins her list for the day. At eleven years of age Katie has assumed most of the household cleaning duties and loves that she has ownership of these “adult” jobs and can do them well. This morning she has the two upstairs bathrooms to clean and vacuuming of the upstairs bedrooms and hallways. While doing her cleaning Katie likes to listen to audio books; right now, she is into the Hobbit.

10:45

Time for another short session with Mom, and this time she is working on her math. They have just completed the NACD math program and are now working on algebra with Khan Academy. They watch the video showing the process they are working on and then do a couple of problems together and are done.

11:00

It’s time for another reading session of a targeted non–fiction story. This one is about Ulysses S. Grant. They review the new vocabulary, then Mom reads the story aloud, then Katie reads it aloud, and then they talk about the story. Today’s discussion goes on longer than usual because Kathy has done unit studies on the Civil War and already has a good knowledge base. She is grappling with the whole issue of slavery, race, and trying to understand where things are today. These issues are often the subjects of dinner discussions.

11:30

Time for Katie’s calisthenics program, which takes her ten minutes, and then she has some free time, which she chooses to spend reading a story to Max.

12:00 p.m.

Lunch time and Katie is teaching Max how to set the table for lunch, while she is heating up the chicken vegetable soup that she and her mom made in a big quantity together and froze. Mom, Max, and Katie have lunch together and talk about what they need to do in their vegetable garden after lunch. Max learns how to rinse and load the lunch dishes into the dishwasher, while Katie wipes down the table and the countertops.

12:30

Mom, Max, and Katie go out to work in the vegetable garden, pulling weeds, watering, and inspecting everything. As they work they talk about the vegetables. Max finds a cool beetle, and Mom takes a picture of it.

1:00

Katie pulls out their books on insects and bugs and Mom jumps online so they can check out the beetle that Max found. Turns out it’s a leaf beetle and Max is really excited and wants to know everything they can find out about the leaf beetle. Mom reads what she has found to Max and Katie, and they explore what other kinds of beetles might be in their garden and which ones are harmful. Max has become a bit of a beetle expert since he discovered dung beetles and spent a month exploring them with the help of his mother and sister and his Dad who got into it as well. Max already has his own little library on nature and fortunately can already read well enough that he can learn on his own.

1:30

Katie completes one of the two math process review tests she does each day, each time completing five problems of five different math processes she has learned. After completing the test, mom checks it and marks each of the four problems she got correct and sees she needs to do a quick two-minute review regarding division of fractions. Katie redoes the problem she missed, and it gets marked correct as well. Following the math test she and Mom do some shared high interest reading.

2:00

Katie completes her second math process review test for the day, then she has time to work on her exploration of Pablo Picasso. Unit studies for the Thompsons simply mean exploring things that are interesting to the depth at which they are interesting, which can vary significantly. Their studies by design are not structured and are fun. The word “work” is reserved for things like cleaning toilets and such, not learning. Katie’s interest in Picasso grew out of her study of Spain, which started with the study of explorers from one of the stories she and her mom read together. Katie is working on her painting and experimenting with trying to make her work look like Picasso. Her dad has learned to politely smile and encourage her when she shows him her creations. Katie works on her own and calls her mom in after awhile to get her opinion on a painting and to ask her about Antoni Gaudi, a Spanish architect whom she wants to study next. Mom tells her that she doesn’t know anything about Gaudi so they can learn about him together. Katie and her mom are learning Spanish together with an online course and actually use it together throughout the day. Max is doing well learning it from them as well.

2:45

Time for Katie to go online and do her NACD Simply Smarter program. Katie works hard to build her processing/cognitive abilities and looks forward to the acknowledgement and rewards her dad gives her for each new high score. She understands that it is her great processing ability (auditory and visual short term and working memory) that makes learning easy for her and thus fun. She enjoys the opportunity to work on it, and her parents appreciate having an eleven-year-old daughter with the maturity and executive function of someone many years older.

3:00

Time for violin practice. Katie has been playing the violin since she was five and has a weekly lesson and loves it. She practices for about half an hour. Unlike most kids her age, Katie wears a watch and stays acutely aware of time.

3:30

Katie’s two neighborhood friends are home from school and they play together outside for awhile and then come into the house to play a game. The three have become great friends. Between the neighborhood kids, kids in homeschool groups they interact with, the kids at church and on her basketball and soccer teams, Katie has a good group of friends and a healthy supervised social life.

5:00

Katie’s friends go home and she has some time to read before dinner. She is really into her book and doesn’t really want to stop to help Mom fix dinner, but she does so without complaint.

5:30

Katie and Mom prepare dinner together. Katie is becoming quite the cook and often prepares one of the items from her expanding recipe box all by herself. Her dad thinks she is going to be a better cook than her mom.

6:00

During the family dinner, there is some discussion on beetles, Spain, and Katie’s wish to be able to go there some day, followed by the bit on the news about the tornado in Oklahoma and what it must be like for those people living there.

6:45

Dinner is done and the dishes cleaned up. Katie, Max, and Dad go outside to shoot some hoops and practice basketball. Katie plays on her community league basketball team and really enjoys it.

7:15

Family movie time. Tonight, is a Disney movie targeted more to Max, but fun for everyone. As they sit down to enjoy their movie, Katie comments that her friend told her that she had hours of homework she was going to have to do tonight and how much she hated it. Doing her homework after dinner was the price she had to pay for playing with Katie and her other friends after school.

9:00

Katie gets ready for bed and has time to read before lights out.

10:00

Katie sets her alarm and lights out.

The end of another NACD Home Education day.

Katie’s days can and do vary significantly and are seen as flexible. Katie’s mom has the freedom to wake up in the morning and decide it’s a good day for a field trip or the weather is nice so they can go help Grandma with her garden. They also have the flexibility to go somewhere for long weekends or even accompany dad on his business trips and go explore new places while he works. As much as they permit themselves to be flexible, they do try to create a plan and a schedule for each day at home and try to adhere to it. The children are both excelling, and keeping everything positive and doing all they can to keep learning fun and on a good pace is paramount. The Thompsons have a vision for their children’s education and a vision for their futures. Their goal is for their children to have many options and to help their children develop their interests, talents, and passions with the goal of them becoming happy, successful adults. They are looking at the big picture, their children as the unique whole individuals they are, and are proactively putting the pieces together.

You need a vision and a proactive plan. We don’t get a “do-over” with our children.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 33 No. 6, 2020 ©NACD

The post NACD Targeted Home-Based Education: The Vision and the Plan appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Truth is that from what I’m hearing from around the country and to some degree internationally, the schools have really done a phenomenal job of creating distant learning programs virtually overnight. It does, however, beg the question as to how much learning is taking place. How distant from learning is it, or was school?

I am hearing from more and more parents who, when actually seeing what is being presented or given to their child, realize that it just doesn’t fit. They complain that they are helping their kids with assignments that are way over their child’s head or just too easy. Parents are realizing that they are getting a snapshot of what the classroom is like for their child, and the picture isn’t pretty.

I have often spoken of the challenge of group education, particularly for the upper or lower third of the school population. How is it possible to target individuals in classrooms of twenty or thirty? Truth is, you can’t. You can’t even really target individuals in classrooms of five or six. The further you get from 1:1 education, the less targeted and less efficient and effective it becomes.

During “normal” school times, parents are often a bit oblivious to what their children are doing in school. But in recent weeks, now that many parents are seeing and hearing more and more of what their children are being given, they are becoming acutely aware that it really doesn’t seem to fit their child. The reality is that what went on in the classroom didn’t either. How could it? How could twenty or thirty or more children, all who are at slightly or significantly different levels academically (children in a typical classroom could easily vary by many grade levels in basic reading and math) and slightly if not significantly different levels of information processing (from that of a typical four year old to that of a typical adult) and who all have slightly to significantly different experiential and general knowledge bases to work from. If they were to allow live feeds of most classrooms, at any given moment who would be shocked to see that many of the children are not really paying attention during the majority of the school day? And sadly, the ones who are not paying attention are they ones who need it the most. As many parents know, when they ask their kids upon arriving home from school the universal question, “What did you do today?” they receive the almost as universal answer, “Nothing.” Not true, but often not far from the mark.

If children are typically spending six hours in school and spending another twenty minutes or more coming and going to school and then completing additional minutes to many hours of homework none or little of which is targeted to them how great is that? These are the most important years of their lives, the years that are going to point the direction and impact the rest of their lives.

I don’t blame teachers for the problems inherent in the system. The task of keeping children busy and engaged away from home for six hours a day and also educating them is rather daunting. If the majority can proceed through the system with a reasonable education, which permits them to go on to higher education or training, then that perhaps defines success. But for those who have issues, who really are not being targeted by the instruction, who are just being moved through the system, individual home based education should be at least considered. For those parents who have the time and inclination to bring their kids home and do home based education, rather than replicating school and pushing hours of non-targeted curriculum, it is incredibility easy to do more, do better, and help your whole child reach his or her potential.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 33 No. 5, 2020 ©NACD

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To be proactive is to anticipate, prepare, and intervene based on a long-term vision and perspective. When anticipating the future, you react accordingly before it actually happens.

To be reactive is to respond to a situation, rather than creating or controlling it.

How does this relate to what we do with our children? What we do in the short term affects the long term; and that myopic/short-sighted intervention can have a negative impact on outcomes.

One contributing cause is lack of a vision, lack of hope, and a willingness to accept a short-term possible solution. Another underlying issue is that most teachers and therapists are not involved for the long term and are not aware of the long-term results or consequences of their interventions. The third contributing factor is a lack of awareness and knowledge of the whole child. When looking only at pieces, one cannot perceive, acknowledge, utilize, or evaluate the impact on the gestalt of the individual.

Armed with decades of experience working with tens of thousands of “Whole Children”, it is relatively easy for us at NACD to look at your children and to be proactive. Being proactive requires looking at a child’s strengths and talents. In addition we must look at weaknesses and issues, determine what pieces we need to put together or issues we need to resolve, in what order, and in what priority to produce a good ultimate outcome. One of the benefits of working with “Whole Children,” working with the full spectrum of children, and working with individuals (often for decades) is that we have the benefit of experience and perspective.

Working with “Whole Children”

I have spoken at length about the importance of working with “Whole Children.” Working with “Whole Children” simply means we are working with all aspects of the child from their health, sleep, sensory function, social function, behavior, speech, language, fine and gross motor function, cognition, and academic development to their attitude, self image, etc. I don’t know if it is possible to be truly proactive without working with the whole child. Most children have disconnected individuals addressing various aspects of their lives, coming and going; and the more issues a child has, generally the more people there are working reactively, not proactively, with them. Working “reactively” means they are reacting to what is perceived as an immediate issue or need, without an historic or long range, long-term vision.

In discussing all of the people who can be involved with your child, you are tempted to associate them all somehow, to call them a team or an army, suggesting that they are somehow a cohesive unit working together. The reality is that they are individuals working with pieces, more often than not in virtual isolation. Such individuals are often working reactively, not proactively. They are working with their one piece generally in virtual isolation and establishing their piece as their priority and generally from a perspective that they are only going to be involved for a relatively short period of time. Working with children for only a few months, or even years, does not permit one to gain a long-term perspective and to understand the implications of what is in reality short-term, reactive intervention.

Proactive Intervention

To help clarify what it means to be proactive, it is best to look at the antonyms or words that are essentially the opposite of proactive. Those words include such things as myopic or short-sighted or improvident. Another way to look at this is to say we are being reactive as opposed to proactive.

Reactive Intervention

If we are being reactive, we are reacting to problems; if we are being proactive we are looking forward, into the future, so as to prepare for the future. As parents with limited experience, it’s often difficult to be proactive. It’s difficult to be proactive if you have not had the experience and knowledge to know the degree to which what is happening today, or not happening today, is going to influence tomorrow, next week, next year, and the future. Sadly, many therapists and educators do not work with individuals over long periods, as in decades, to understand what issues can be created by working perhaps hard, but not working from a long-term, proactive perspective.

Some common examples of being reactive rather than proactive would include things like teaching young children with Down syndrome to sign. (link to Signing contra-indicated for DS) The perception is that Johnny isn’t talking and is frustrated, so let’s give him a means of communication that he can use soon–signing. Looking at the short-term results, which may be the child being able to communicate a few basic needs and being perhaps less frustrated, reinforces the use of signing. But if looked at long-term and proactively, we discover that we have had a negative impact on the child’s ultimate ability to communicate verbally, and even more significantly, have had a negative impact on the development of the child’s auditory processing, with resulting adverse affects on the child’s cognition and global maturity. Reactive intervention is not the best intervention.

One of the more glaring areas where we often see disastrous effects of reactive intervention is in the area of mobility and walking. We sometimes have children come to us who never developed the neurodevelopmental or the structural foundation that can ultimately produce a child who is a functional walker. Being proactive, we know that we have to follow a typical sequence of development, which among other things, requires the neurological, tactile, proprioceptive, and structure pieces of the child going through the necessary developmental stages before working on standing and walking. Children in walkers who had been “helped” to stand before they had the strength and structure to do it themselves, or do it properly, and then “assisted” to walk using various apparatuses to hold them up so they could move their legs, usually end up not being able to walk independently. Often they have created structural issues that even numerous surgical interventions cannot properly address. Children you see walking with walkers or braces and crutches almost always end up in wheelchairs. Yes, the goal is walking; but can we achieve it by circumventing the foundational pieces?

An example of a reactive approach in education is encouraging children to write before they neuro-developmentally are ready. Sixty or seventy years ago, it was not uncommon to make left-handed children in kindergarten and first grade, at five or six years of age, write with their right hands. This practice was stopped because interfering with the natural development of handedness resulted in a plethora of neurological and even emotional problems. Today this isn’t happening; but today we have preschool education, which is even creating more problems by making children write before they developmentally have even firmly established a dominant hand. A child may be leaning toward the right hand, for example, at three or four, and if encouraged to write with the right hand, establish a skill set for writing with the right hand. Ultimately such a child may turn out to be left-handed. Because the skill set for this specific function was established, the child will tend to continue to write with the right hand and is generally encouraged to continue to write with the right hand, resulting in all of the issues that were created 60 years ago, including poor handwriting.

The Reality of Education

The reality of education in general is that the very structure and organization of school as we generally know it almost defines reactive intervention. Education is generally perceived from the short-term perspective of needing to get specific curriculum material into a child’s brain, whether or not the material is targeted to the specific child’s present knowledge base, to their level of processing and understanding, let alone their interests. The net result of reactive education is very often poor outcomes, children often learning to dislike or “hate” school, which becomes synonymous with hating learning; and often because of the abnormal environment of narrow competition, leaving the system with a damaged self-image and lacking a perspective of who they are and what they can be. Proactively it’s not difficult to understand that at the foundation of education we should have the goal of teaching the child to love learning and to make them feel that they are smart and can learn. Is anyone shocked to hear that children do well learning things they love and struggle with what they hate? If the goal of education is to produce adults who are actually educated, who become not just lifelong readers, but life long learners with the confidence to pursue their hopes and dreams, then the system needs to be re-evaluated and made proactive not reactive.

Educational & Therapeutic Perceptions

There are numerous examples in educational and therapeutic intervention that demonstrate the negative aspects of reactive intervention. The problem is ubiquitous, and it doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Proactive intervention implores us to look at the child from a long-term perspective and with a vision and a plan to produce better outcomes. If existing outcomes are perceived as actual reflections of an individual’s potential, there is no motivation for change.

Perception of potential is a reflection of one’s experience. I recall a colleague correcting me many decades ago when I referred to someone as having twenty years of experience. He told me that the reality was that they had a year of experience twenty times, not twenty years of experience. I have been extremely disappointed to see how incredibly slow change in traditional education and therapeutic intervention has been. But doing the same reactive things year after year and producing the same limited results has not stoked change, but has reinforced the perspective of limited potential, and has encouraged many educators and therapists to keep doing the same things, producing the same inevitable outcomes.

Proactive intervention is stimulated by a need to do things better and to improve outcomes, all of which is perpetuated by a vision of what can be and what should be.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 32 No. 5, 2019 ©NACD

The post Developmental/Therapeutic Intervention: Proactive or Reactive? appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Free with your NACD membership

NACD Math was designed not only to teach children how to do math, but also to help them learn that math is easy, that they are good at math, and to enjoy it.

NACD Math is now made available online for our NACD clients through the NACD Family Portal. The new updated NACD Math replaces Modular Math, as well as supplemental math books.

Lyn Waldeck and Sara Erling, along with John McCallum, have been working for the last two years to bring together the pieces of NACD Math. NACD Math is targeted for the special needs population, particularly for those children with Down syndrome, those on the autism spectrum, and children with learning disabilities who have historically had difficulty with math. The program has also been used with great success for typical children to establish initial math concepts and to teach them math processes from initial number and quantity concepts through sixth grade computation.

NACD Math has a long history of development and has been used with thousands of children internationally.

Math education for special needs children has been an issue, except for those who have been using Bob Doman’s Modular Math program. The reason our program has been so effective is that it is built around how children learn, whether they are on the spectrum, have Down syndrome, or simply are young. Historically math instruction requires a lot of words. A lot of words are not something any of these children process or understand well. Our math program is very visual and teaches the child just one step at a time; and it is designed to avoid the need for, or dependency on, prompts.

NACD Math has been designed so that virtually anyone can teach it. The program incorporates video step-by-step instruction, so the teacher, parent, or even a sibling can watch a short video and then replicate/teach the simple steps. Each math computational process builds on the previous processes, creating simple transitions from one process to the next.

NACD Math has permitted many hundreds of children with Down syndrome to start learning math even before their typical peers and often to stay ahead of them for many years. With the solid NACD Math foundation, children with DS have been able to move into algebra and higher math. To say that NACD Math has been helpful for this population is a gross understatement; it has been a game changer. NACD Math builds a math foundation and understanding that has permitted special needs children to advance into higher math and has established a foundation for typical children that gets them off to a running start and puts them way ahead of their peers.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 31 No. 10, 2018 ©NACD

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To Get Started with the NACD Program,
please visit our NACD Get Started page

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Three Sets of Concepts

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Video Instructions for the Parent or Instructor

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Handouts with Examples of Each Concept

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To Get Started with the NACD Program,
please visit our NACD Get Started page

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We love hearing from our past and present families. It’s always tough for us when we graduate a child, seeing them move on, full of expectation and hope, and hopefully armed with a solid foundation. We always appreciate hearing from the families and learning how they fared.

We just received this note from Charles Smith and Marilyng Perez Montero regarding their daughter Ilaria. I recall meeting Ilaria and her family for the first time. Ilaria was a very sweet, quiet, well-mannered 10-year-old who lacked confidence and who came to us with a combination of processing issues, academic problems, and physical strength and coordination challenges. She was very anxious to do what she needed to do to better herself, and her parents were obviously dedicated to doing all they could do to make it happen.

Ilaria’s family was very organized and hit her program running and started seeing changes almost immediately. The family kept in close contact with me through their coach, Marta Palmes, and worked not only hard, but smart. The plan from the beginning was to keep Ilaria home and do NACD homeschool, get her “pieces” put together, and then to have her go back to school. Ilaria was with us for less than 18 months, but we were delighted to see her transform into a confident and capable young lady in that relatively short period.

When Charles, Ilaria’s dad, asked me if I thought Ilaria was able to handle going back to school, I told him that I felt she was; but when he told me where he wanted her to go, I was a bit concerned. He wasn’t going to just send her to school, he wanted her to go to a very challenging, tough academic school. I should not have worried. I will let Dad’s words speak for how she has done.

Congratulations, Team Smith!

—Bob Doman

Dear Marta [at NACD],

I am writing to inform you of our daughter Ilaria’s achievement of a 4.0 GPS her first year in middle school and being recognized as a recipient of the President’s Education Awards Program—all this less than six months after graduating from the NACD program. It is a momentous achievement and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to you and Bob Doman for all the efforts you have contributed on behalf of Marilyng, myself and Ilaria.

Your support during the design and implementation of Ilaria’s NACD program has been nothing short of overwhelming. Needless to say, without your and Bob’s expertise, input and encouragement, Marilyn and I would never have been able to achieve success in carrying out the program with Ilaria.

As you may recall, we were introduced to Bob Doman and NACD in the Summer of 2016. I was doing some research online for organizations that could assist our 10-year-old daughter, Ilaria, whom had been officially diagnosed as having a “learning disorder”. Ilaria was falling behind in mathematics as well as English and was lacking in physical strength and coordination.

We had tried a number of different private companies and public resources but did not feel any were right for Ilaria’s circumstances. Some were very expensive, and others did not provide the personalized attention we felt was necessary. Fortunately, I came across Bob’s name along with NACD when I was reading reviews by a client of one of the private companies we were meeting with. That day changed our lives!

After watching the online videos of Bob explaining how a child’s brain develops and why it is important to use teaching methods that take into account, we made contact with NACD. My wife and I were very excited to work with Bob and create a personalized development program for Ilaria.

We started implementation of the program in July 2016 and found that your input and weekly support was invaluable. In addition to your encouragement and support you greatly assisted us with the practical implementation of the program. I can distinctly remember your suggestion of creating an excel spreadsheet to keep track of and monitor the daily activities and progress of the program. This helped us tremendously.

Ilaria made steady progress throughout the remainder of 2016 and through the first half of 2017. In august of 2017, she started 6^th grade at a new middle school considered to be one of the most academically challenging schools in Florida. By the end of the first semester in December, she had achieved the honor roll during both quarters and finished with a 3.6 GPA. It was at that time, during her December evaluation with Bob, that he informed her she had successfully graduated from the NACD program.

The NACD program along with the support from yourself and Bob changed our lives and gave Ilaria the confidence to believe in herself and achieve her goals of making the honor roll in her first year of middle school. Thank you very much!

NACD Newsletter, October 2018 ©NACD

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One of the aspects that I love about working with NACD is meeting and working with so many amazing families. Being a “program-doing-mom” in this role, has also added many other unexpected benefits, some of which would be, being inspired by, challenged by and motivated by our wonderful parents and their children. We really do have the most dedicated parents anywhere, the cream of crop, parents that are not scared to roll up their sleeves and “get busy”.

One of our families that I would like to ‘brag’ about a little is Danielle and her family. I met Danielle a couple of years ago in Atlanta. She is a fantastic kid and she is a hard worker! She gets up at 5 am every weekday to do the reading and math portions of her program, before her mom goes to work. Danielle’s mom works part time as a family physician and she has a dedicated helper implementing Danielle’s NACD homeschool program when she is at work.

Even though they have a helper implementing program, Danielle’s mom takes full responsibility for getting things done and is constantly making plans to get Danielle to do the very best she can, and to raise her intensity.

Here is Danielle’s mom telling about some of her recent accomplishments.

“Earlier this year I was just looking at all the displayed trophies that my two older kids had won for various activities at school and I thought to myself, ‘oh, Danielle has no trophy. I wish she had at least one. I don’t want her to feel left out’. Then I had a second thought, ‘you know what—she’s homeschooled, why can’t I give her a trophy?’

So I pondered what the trophy would be awarded for and since we were trying to encourage reading, I decided to award it for reading. I thought of how to make it challenging and decided that I would award it for reading for 1000 minutes. We were already keeping a log of minutes to keep us on track.

I ordered the trophy and the day it arrived she was so excited. I didn’t show it to her but told her she would get it once she hit 1,000 minutes. She immediately went to add up her minutes and told me she had a total of 930. I said to her, ‘well, we can make up the 70 minutes on the weekend and you get your trophy’. This was a Thursday. But Danielle insisted, ‘can we go read now, I want to make it up today.’ As tired as I was we went up and read for 70 minutes and I presented the trophy to her. The engraved plate read: Danielle 2018, Super Reader.’ She was so excited—she kissed it, hugged it, admired it over and over again. Mission accomplished!!!”

Danielle has since received another trophy: “Mighty Mathematician”, and a coupon for “Baking Cookies with Mom”.

It all goes to show—we can write the best program, but without YOU, mom or dad, we cannot help your child reach further and maybe get that next digit on their digit spans or become highly capable or WIN that trophy!

Way to go Danielle and family. You inspire!

P.S. – Danielle came to NACD having developmental delays. Her word recognition was at a 4.2 grade level and math at 4.5 grade level. She had an auditory digit span of 4-5, a reverse auditory digit span of 3 and a visual digit span of 6.

Now, 20 months later her word recognition is at 7.8, math at 8.2. She has an Auditory digit span of 8, Reverse auditory digit span of 7 and a Visual digit span of 10. 

NACD Newsletter, July 2018 ©NACD

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by Robert J. Doman Jr.

Summer is over at last. The kids are back in school and you are getting settled into the new routine. Don’t get settled too fast, because now is the time to reorganize, get your act together and to do it right!

By the time this article reaches your homes, you have probably already started the settling process. The children are getting used to getting up early again. You’re discovering what a few hours of peace and quiet can mean to your sanity and you’re probably already slipping back into some of the same old bad habits. Don’t do it; take the time now and look at where you are going, where you would like to be going and how you can get there. Get organized, look at all or as many factors involved as possible and put together your game plan. If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.

Let us look at some more common problems and conflicts that arise from the interaction of parent-child, parent-teacher, child-teacher, parent-child- school, and home program.

Class Placement

A decision was probably made last spring or during the summer about what class your child would be attending this fall. For most there was little or no decision made, your child merely went to the next grade. For many of you, however, making the choice of class was not achieved as easily. Depending upon your child’s particular needs and the availability of special services within your community, your decision and that of your school could have been difficult or more painful than root canal work. However, when the decision for class placement was made, that decision was based largely upon supposition. What you, the school, or both “thought” would be best. Now that your child has had some time in the classroom you can look at the placement knowing how it is rather than how you thought it would be. With your new knowledge you may wish to make a change if you think another placement may be better. Act now, don’t spend the rest of the year wishing you had.

If you are looking for the ideal class placement, chances are great that you will be disappointed. You do, however, want to find a class that meets most of the basic criteria for an appropriate placement. The classroom environment should be positive, affording the child the necessary structure. Material should be presented at the level of your child or as close as possible. The other children in the class should be functioning at a level so as to provide your child with good models and the child should perceive the class in a positive way. Many parents ask me whether I think they should put their child into a “normal” class or a “special” class. The question is one that I can rarely answer for them because it depends upon the particular “normal” or “special” class and the child. Remember that by assuming more of the responsibility at home for your child’s education the less crucial the class placement is.

Length of School Day

In general, children under six can handle a half day of school and children six and over a full day. By a half day and a full day I am referring to a three- and six-hour day, respectively, with fifteen minutes travel time to and from school. For many children the time required to ride to and from school on a bus is excessive and greatly adds to the length of time they are away from home. For the child with relatively severe problems and a lengthy home program, the parent may wish to only utilize a half-day school program. You should not expect your child to spend six hours in school, plus travel time and expect them to perform well at home for a home program which takes two or more hours to accomplish. Many families have discovered that if they take the children to school themselves and pick them up that it greatly reduces the child’s time away from home. A rule of thumb for appraisal of school versus home time, is that the greater your child’s problems the greater their need for individual attention, and the greater the child’s needs for individual attention the less able the school to provide for your child’s needs.

Extracurricular Activities

Organized sports, music lessons, dance lessons, gymnastics, Karate, choir, church activities, social organizations, scouts, etc., there are many activities that may be vying for your child’s time. All the activities mentioned and others may be positive and productive but must be viewed within the context of the child’s needs. Time is limited. Time used is invested so invest it wisely. Each extracurricular activity that is worthy of the investment must be directed toward a particular need of the child. It must also be incorporated into the child’s schedule on a priority basis. Because an activity is fun, a friend is involved in the activity, or because you think that it would be nice may not be sufficient reason for the investment. As an example of what is often a poor investment (not always) is the investment of time and money in piano lessons. Some children really want to play the piano. Some families are musically inclined and can regularly provide the child with special opportunities to develop and use musical talent and ability. However, many parents make their children take lessons and very few of those ever develop a skill that they can use in their lives. Look at the cost when deciding the worth of the investment. A child who takes piano or violin, or whatever lessons and practices for fifteen minutes per day is making an annual investment of 5,475 minutes. That is a very large investment. Can your child afford it? If “yes” great, go for it. If your child has some major or minor inefficiencies that go unattended because there is not sufficient time, the lessons are very possibly a very poor investment. Measure each extracurricular activity and its value against your child’s needs and the value to their future.

Homework and Program

One of our more difficult dilemmas that we face once school has begun, is that of homework and program. This year, according to a national report on the status of American education, you can expect your children to be bringing home more work than ever before. “If the children of our country are not learning as well as they should be, give them more homework.” There is no way to address this issue without looking at the homework. While doing this, please bear in mind some points we make in our tapes and seminars. First, the educational process is one in which we provide input to produce output. Second, with rare exception, is that individualized education is the most efficient form of education. Third, many ways traditionally utilized to put in information are inefficient, slow, and negative, turning the child off to learning rather than turning them on to it.

The other night my son asked for assistance with his geometry homework. He had not the slightest idea how to do the assigned problems. It has been over twenty years since I had geometry and the assignment that he brought home bore no resemblance to anything that I can remember. I could have said, “Alex, it’s your assignment not mine. Go back into your room and just keep reading over the material until you get it, even if it takes all night.” If that had been my choice he would have spent hours learning to hate geometry. He would have been looking at something that did not make sense to him and providing his brain with wrong information. Instead, I sat down with him and tried with him to make sense out of the material, if possible. We completed the assignment together slightly improving the quality of input. The result was that he did not spend the evening in frustration. We did make some discoveries and found geometry somewhat interesting. Alex learned that he should really pay attention in class. He would even go to his geometry teacher after school and make sure that he understood so he would not get lost this early in the year. By the way, we got half of them right; it’s not impossible after all. I think we are getting the hang of it and I bet that we do even better the next time.

One problem surrounding much of your child’s schoolwork is that of “instructional level” and “frustration level.” Giving a test to discover what your child knows produces a grade level at which he or she is functioning. This level is called his or her “frustration level.” This means that if I were to give the child material at that level, that the child could not do the work independently without experiencing frustration. Therefore, in order for the child to work independently, I should give the child material a grade level below that point so that the child can work without frustration. This is all true, and if the child is to be working on output and working independently the “instructional level” is the appropriate level at which to do it. Let us call it what it is: the “output level.” Rather than call the level at the height of the child’s knowledge the “frustration level” let us call it the “input level.”

There is obvious value in output. However, in analyzing the investment of our child’s time we need to keep a balance between input and output with the weight leaning to the former for the child who is behind and needs to catch up.

Homework is used primarily to reinforce that which is presented in school. Homework is also given with the assumption that the parent is not going to take much, if any, of the responsibility for the child’s education. For the parent who is actively working with their child on a home program, the basic premise upon which homework is constructed is erroneous. Teachers and involved parents must acknowledge that the teacher’s responsibility is situational and temporary while the responsibility of the parent transcends that of the teacher and is relatively permanent.

The role of the involved parent is such that you must analyze homework in light of what you are doing with the child yourself, provide assistance when it is needed and requested direct study time and technique to improve your child’s efficiency and use of time (e.g., have the children put definitions, dates, etc., on tape), and establish good lines of communication with your child’s teacher so that your efforts can complement each other.

Communication Between Parent and Teacher

Countless times I have had parents tell me that they thought everything was going well in school. Then the report card came out and it was too late for them to do anything about the problem. Communication between parent and teacher should occur weekly and when a particular problem exists, on a daily basis. Most teachers want your child to do well. Most teachers welcome the involvement of parents, and most teachers want all the help that they can get. Speak with your child’s teacher or teachers. Establish lines of communication, be it regular notes sent back and forth, weekly meetings or telephone calls, etc. Let the teacher know that you are involved, and plan to be involved. If you are unable to elicit the cooperation of the teacher, speak with the school principal. A teacher’s job is to work with the children and the parents. A teacher who is unwilling to cooperate with parents, or who feels threatened by a parent’s involvement, needs to change or be changed.

Structure

Do not bet your child’s future on his or her ability to structure their time well and to use their resources to the best of their ability. Help the child by establishing a structured routine and by following it consistently. Establish study time, homework time, program time, and free time. Limit the use of the television, stereo, and telephone. When establishing a structure, be firm but reasonable. The first thing to schedule, not the last, is free time. You cannot expect a child to spend six hours in school, come home to homework and program, then go to bed so that they can get up the next morning smiling and eager to begin a new exciting day. Time needs to exist each day in which the child can be a child, to relax and have fun. If you create a negative environment, do not expect a positive child.

Terrible Teens

The person who coined the phrase “Terrible Twos” didn’t have a teenager. Working with a teenager requires a terrific sense of balance knowing when to pull back on the reins, and when to let them have their head. If I were to identify the three most common problems parents have in dealing with their teenagers they would be: 1) being negative not positive; 2) not providing them with sufficient structure; and 3) attempting to assume their responsibility.

Do not be afraid to establish structure. The nature of the beast is such that they resist structure, but really welcome it. Teenagers are at a point in their lives where hundreds, if not thousands, of options open up to them. They are required to make many choices before being equipped to do so. If we can provide them with a firm structure to eliminate some of those choices we are doing them a great favor.

Your teenager should be responsible for their own grades. As a parent you should provide the structure, a place for them to work and study and assistance when needed. It is not your responsibility for the grades received: If the grades are good, they are your grades; if they are poor, they are your grades. Either way, your child is not being given the opportunity to earn and own his or her own grades. As a parent of a teenager, assume your responsibilities, not theirs.

Create a Positive Environment

First and last, put it at the top of your list, the bottom, and in the middle: Create a Positive Environment. Now is the time get organized, reestablish your commitment, and get going. Your child is worth your investment.

Reprinted from the Journal of The NACD Foundation (formerly The National Academy for Child Development)

Journal of the National Association for Child Development
1987, Volume 8, No. 2

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