The teacher and school should suggest specific learning disability interventions (new teaching strategies) to help address your child's learning needs. Here's what to do next.
Work together to identify strategies and accommodations to implement a learning disability intervention.
The teacher and school should suggest specific interventions (new teaching strategies) to help address your child's learning needs. You and the school can decide together what may work best.
They can also suggest accommodations. These are adjustments to the classroom environment to remove barriers that make it hard for your child to learn. These may be things like a certain placement of their desk to reduce distractions, frequent breaks, or extra time to take tests.
See the next section to learn more about what kinds of learning disability interventions the school can put in place, and what else they can do to help your child.
Once the interventions are in place, it's important to monitor your child's progress to see if they are helping.
How to keep track of your child's progress:
- Ask the teacher how they are assessing your child from week to week. They should have a system in place to do this, and you should be seeing the results.
- Get the reports from the assessments and make sure you understand them.
- Check in with the teacher every 2 weeks to ask about your child's progress. The curriculum-based assessments should tell you if they are making progress.
- Keep in touch with the teacher and your child. Ask regularly about progress.
- Watch your child do their homework and ask about what they are learning. Stay involved!
- Talk to your child about how the new teaching strategies are helping. (Make sure the interventions are happening! For example: "Are you working in your small reading group every day? How is that going?")
What if the interventions are not helping?
- Talk to their teacher. Ask them to adjust the intervention. There are many different things they can try. If one strategy is not working, they should try others.
- If your child is not making progress in 2 months, ask for a special education evaluation. You can do this while the interventions are going on.
- Don't wait too long. The school year is shorter than we think and if your child is not keeping up, you want to catch it quickly!