How We're Homeschooling Our Daughter With Cerebral Palsy

If you're considering homeschooling your child with cerebral palsy, here are some of the things that went into us making that choice, how we figured out what curriculum to buy, and how we are structuring our days while our daughter is learning at home.

Can you homeschool a child with a disability/cerebral palsy?

Absolutely, YES! I've homeschooled my typically developing son on and off throughout the years, but we liked the school setup we had for our daughter, and if I'm being honest, educating a child with a disability felt incredibly intimidating. I also feel like there is a narrative that parents are smart enough to homeschool their child with a disability and its too complicated...

Well, this year I got pushed to a breaking point (which most parents hit, and leads them to making decisions like this), and decided to throw caution to the wind, and I'm so glad I did. You absolutely can do it; you are capable, and honestly, it's not that much different than homeschooling my typically developing child.

How I figured out what curriculum to use for our daughter with cerebral palsy:

This was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. I simply took her most recent copy of her IEP and fed it into ChatGPT and then asked it which grade level I should use for each subject. It got me into a ballpark range, and then I looked at the grade level above and below what it told me, and picked the one I felt was best. In our situation, I did go a grade level below what ChatGPT had guessed, and it's working out well for us right now.

The Curriculum I'm Using to Homeschool My Child with Cerebral Palsy:

As a Christian parent who has homeschooled for years, I have always loved The Good and The Beautiful. I know it's a little controversial in Christian circles, and frankly, I don't care. That is always my starting point for curriculum, and then I branch out to other things as needed.

Math: We are using the free download of the math curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful.

Language Arts: Again, we are using the free download of the language arts curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful.

Science: We are using the free marine biology curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful.

History: The Good and the Beautiful has a history curriculum, but it is so involved and expensive (with no free download option), that I had to find something that would work well for our daughter. This led us to coreknowledge.com, where I put in the subject and grade level we were looking for and picked a history topic that worked well for us. We decided to study India (if you know, you know!)

Our Homeschool Schedule for our Daughter with Cerebral Palsy:

It's pretty simple, but we start our day with Language Arts, then we do a 10-minute movement break (which we also count as physical therapy and PE), then we come inside and do math, then she gets a 20-minute Minecraft break (also counts as STEM), while I read aloud to her for 20 minutes. After that, we work on Science or History (we alternate between the two each day), and then we do Life Skills. This could look like grocery shopping, running an errand, working on chores, or cooking, depending on the day and what needs to be done!

I had ChatGPT put it all into a schedule for me so my daughter knows what we're doing and when, and I keep it on the fridge so she can see it each day.

I intentionally did not put timestamps onto anything because I want it to be more of a flow than a rigid thing. If I've learned anything about being a mom of a child with a disability, flow over rigidity is key.

I made our schedule into a template that you can edit here!

How I'm Managing my Expectations with Homeschooling:

I think the key to making homeschooling a child with a disability is managing your own expectations. If you want it to go perfectly, you're going to get frustrated, and it's going to be a bad experience for everyone involved.

I don't expect my child to be a marine biologist, but if we talk about marine biology and animals and she has a positive 10-minute exposure to it? Awesome. I don't expect her to be an expert on the history of India, but if she has a positive 10-minute exposure, awesome.

I do ask questions as we go and give her options for the answer: "Is the ocean water colder at the top of the surface or at the bottom of the ocean?" and let her pick the answer. Sometimes she's right, other times she's not, and then we talk about it.

If you expect all right answers all the time, this will be frustrating for you. Check that at the door and have fun.

We are also doing part-time public school still:

It worked out with our district that we can go to school every other day. She will receive her related services on her IEP (OT and SLP) at school, and work on educational IEP goals at school, and then we will do everything I just talked about at home the days she is not in school. This is an option in our district, so I would check to see if it is in yours as well.

This way our daughter gets to go to some of her junior high classes as well like Spanish and art, while also still seeing her friends, which was important to us.