Teaching your child how to accommodate for themselves and advocate for themselves is a precious gift

In homeschooling, we learn to make accommodations for our children and advocate for our children every day. We strive as teachers to discover how our child learns best and what accommodations they will need to succeed. When they are not under our teaching, we advocate for others to give them these accommodations as well. The sad part is that we will not always be around to do this for them. As we raise them and teach them, we need to also teach them how to advocate for themselves so they can succeed as adults. We also need to teach them to accept their weaknesses and to find accommodations that work for them to help them turn those weaknesses around. For example, I have a daughter with dyslexia. She struggles academically due to this, and it takes her twice as long to complete assignments and get the best grade she can. We have discovered however that she is a very visual learner, so as often as possible we use resources and media that give her this visual education. Due to this, she is now in college and is one of the most entertaining and fun teachers I know. She has chosen to pursue her passions despite her reading difficulties and has found video presentations, etc to help her learn what would have been very difficult to learn from a textbook. She also is very good at advocating for herself. She knows when a certain assignment's structure is not working for her and she knows how to respectfully talk to a professor and ask if she can do the assignment a different way. When they let her, they are always very impressed. So, just want to say...don't forget to teach your kiddos how to advocate for themselves and how to not be afraid to use whatever accommodations they need to be able to succeed. Learning differently makes us unique.