by Carol Comanse
I love getting your newsletters. I have found a couple of sites that have proven to be very good for kids with learning disabilities and one that has an abundant source for parents who want to teach using religion.
My grandson is autistic and I am currently using www.time4learning.com for my basic teaching. It covers language arts, math, science, social studies and there is an extra section called language arts extensions where the kids are taught a variety of things. There are tests and quizzes, and reports are generated for you to print out so you can track your child's progress. There are also worksheets to print out. It is computer based and he can work at his own pace, even doing the subjects he needs extra help in or things he excels in, at a different grade level. At $19.99/month it is a great value and there is a multi-child discount. I even used it for my middle school granddaughter when she had to be withdrawn from school for 2 months. She went back to regular school with a better understanding of things she had already been taught and made the A-B honor roll for the grading period for the first time.
I use www.spellingcity.com for my grandson's spelling. It is a free site. You can enter your own list of words, use their word lists, or even link to lists teachers in other schools are using or have used. If you want to share a list with another homeschool parent you can do that too if you know the nickname for their lists. There are lots of games (like hangman, fill in the missing letter, unscramble the letters, etc.) that use the words you are using for the week so the kids really love it.
I also use https://www.currclick.com. This is a site where you can purchase inexpensive ebooks. They vary widely in subject matter. Some of them are books to read, workbooks and several of them are religion based. They also offer what I think are lesson plans but I don't use them so haven't really looked at them too closely. They also offer online live classes, some of which are free. We are currently using the free Water Water Everywhere class which is a live 6 week science course. There are 2 experiments each week with worksheets, a forum, a blog, and a graded test. I mainly chose it for my grandson since science is not my forte but even the older kids (13 and 16) are doing it and loving it.
I hope you will check out these sites and pass this information on to other parents in one of your newsletters. I have tried several approaches with my grandson and these are the ones that I have finally found that hold his interest long enough for him to actually learn without becoming frustrated. He was recently tested by his doctor and he is at his appropriate grade level. I took him out of public school because they wanted him to repeat first grade after having already repeated kindergarten. That would have made him 9 years old in first grade. He is still having some trouble with reading but has made great progress and is well above where he was in public school using these programs.
Response: Thanks Carol for sharing all this information with us! I've heard good things about all of these sites.