My first post

Ok, here it goes....this blogging thing is very new to me and I'm not 100% sure of what I'm doing...but I'll give it a shot.


I wanted to start a blog because my husband and I decided to homeschool our youngest child, who will be starting high school in the fall.  I am hoping this blog will help me organize my thoughts and to hopefully engage others in homeschooling discussions and/or disussions regarding education in the regular school system....especially as it pertains to special ed.


Our son has been in special ed since he began our county's birth to 3 program.  He was officially tested in 2006. His spec. ed teacher thought for sure he had ADD and wanted us to put him on medication. We thought there was something else going on so we had him tested at our Children's Hospital in Milwaukee, WI.  We were so happy we had that done! Not only did it show he did not have ADD, it answered our concerns about our son.


He was diagonosed with a language processing disorder affecting both his comprehension and production of the spoken language and childhood apraxia of speech.  (http://www.apraxia-kids.org/)  It was thought that what appeared to be ADD was due to the fact that his listening skills were/are due to this language impairment.

This diagnosis helped us plan his IEPs (www.ldonline.org/indepth/iep) better and also the way we helped him at home. I know there are some parents who are opposed to having a label put on their child, but in many ways having the "problem" named aids us to know how to help our child better, it also opens the door to therapies which might be helpful.

In future posts I will discuss some of the challenges as well as the highlights of our son's school years to present. For now, I will end my first post in saying that in spite of all the good things that have helped our son in the regular public school setting, we are hoping to tackle the issues that a regular school cannot address, through no fault of their own.

Thank you for reading my first post, and I would appreciate any feedback, especially from those who have children with special learning needs.