Common Homeschooling Mistakes with Struggling Learners

Make Elementary Age Years About Foundations

If you are homeschooling a struggling learner, your timeline and priorities are different. This article focuses on homeschooling mistakes mainly related to misunderstanding the overall arc of a child’s academic career, with a particular focus on helping struggling learners.

Education is not about knowledge early on. It’s about learning to learn. In elementary school, children must build a foundation of academic, social, and executive function skills that set the stage for a lifelong love of learning.

For many children, learning to learn comes naturally, and so by 7 or 8 years old, listening is automatic and they are able to improve reading fluency effortlessly. That’s not the case for struggling learners. Developing and automating the so-called learning MAPS – memory, attention, processing, and sequencing – takes much more effort.

If your child has a learning delay, you cannot assume these skills will develop naturally; you must target them deliberately. This includes language activities and possibly OT exercises. Filling in these skills and creating a strong cognitive foundation are priorities. There will be plenty of time to build knowledge later. By 6th grade, ideally, your child:

1. Can read independently with comprehension
2. Has number sense, knows math facts
3. Can focus for sustained periods
4. Can self-regulate, plan, and get things done
5. Loves learning

For struggling learners, these are stretch goals. Your plan should be to get there at your child’s pace, in a way that doesn’t erode their natural love of learning. With that foundation-building goal in mind for your struggling elementary-age learner, here are some thoughts.

Homeschooling Mistakes To Avoid

Mistake #1. Not Understanding Your Child’s Delays and Strengths

Delays. If your child has a diagnosis, be aware of the symptoms and difficulties that diagnosis entails. Oftentimes, the consequences are broader than you might think. For instance, dyslexia is associated with difficulty listening in class because language processing delays cause most dyslexia.

If you don’t have a formal diagnosis, try at least to get a sense of your child’s reading level. Gemm Learning offers a free nationally-normed reading assessment here. If your child is behind, you should prioritize improving reading.

If your child’s reading is more than a year behind, consider a homeschool dyslexia reading curriculum like Gemm Learning or a professional assessment from a Speech-Language Pathologist, an educational psychologist, or a neuropsychologist. This helps identify dyslexia, ADHD, auditory processing disorder, etc.

Know the Strengths: Understanding your child’s learning strengths is as important as knowing their challenges. This will help you plan.

Learning delays are frustrating and exhausting. They erode confidence and a love of learning. Feed your child’s confidence tank by ensuring she spends plenty of time doing things she is good at – sports, arts, etc.

Mistake #2. Set Unrealistic End of 5th Grade Goals

Establish realistic goals based on the starting point and whether a learning intervention is needed. Again, focus goals on a learning foundation. At an elementary age, don’t let knowledge take priority over learning to learn.

• Set Realistic, Personalized Goals: Focus on progress over perfection. Break goals into small, attainable steps.

• Work at Your Child’s Pace:  Adjust your pace to match your child’s processing and energy levels.

• Prioritize Core Skills: Focus first on literacy, numeracy, and executive function.

The key takeaways here are (1) to set goals and remind yourself of them often, and (2) to individualize goals for your child and resist the urge to set goals based on what you read on the Internet for other children, which you know to be unattainable for your child.

There’s something to be said for stretching and aiming high. However, transparency matters, too, so sharing goals with your child and making their attainment a joint venture also has value. The goals should be realistic.

Mistake #3. Not Understanding That Learning Is Sequential

Reading mastery has seven essential steps. They start with language processing, learning phonics, decoding with automaticity, and thinking while reading. Progress to the next step only occurs with mastery of the prior one.

Similarly, high-level thinking, including executive function and reasoning, cannot develop until the basics of learning are in place. That means processing language efficiently, sustaining attention for extended periods, holding details in working memory, and accurate sequencing.

If your child struggles with language and/or reading fundamentals, that needs to be your focus. Working on executive function, e.g., modeling how to plan or teaching organization skills, is more helpful after the fundamentals are in place.

Similarly, we would argue that spending too much time on difficult books or higher-level knowledge-based curriculum content is possibly futile and counterproductive, as it undermines confidence. It’s time better spent on learning readiness and the fundamentals.

To help a struggling learner navigate homeschool without feeling inadequate, here are some curriculum tips:

• Don’t follow a rigid curriculum—adapt it to your child’s pace and interests.
• Choose curricula with:
  • Clear structure and small steps (e.g., Math U See, All About Reading).
  • Built-in review cycles to reinforce memory.
  • Engaging content with frequent breaks and hands-on activities.

Mistake #4. Too Much Content After Vendor Hall Visits!

A classic homeschooling mistake is to visit a homeschool event and have your head turned by all the cool curriculum options – history, French, art, etc.

For your struggling learner, curriculum clutter is almost definitely not the right call. Knowledge accumulation should take a back seat to learning to learn – literacy, numeracy, and executive function.

Some curriculum and activities will indirectly support these goals, such as being part of a sports team (which builds character) or music appreciation, which stimulates processing skills that support reading and learning.

However, some subjects do not support a focus on foundations. For instance, we would not recommend a foreign language. Children struggling to learn in their native language are better off not having their processing challenged with another language.

Similarly, we would be careful about history books unless you plan to read them aloud to your child, which, of course, helps your child build the language-processing foundation needed for reading comprehension. There’s plenty of time for history, etc., once your child is an efficient and enthusiastic learner in middle school and beyond.

Mistake #5. Follow What Other Families Are Doing

You join a support group, go to Vendor Halls, and read online about what other families are doing. You are naturally drawn to following their lead.

However, you are the world expert on your child. Trust your gut.

While experts can help, and others can provide input, you are best placed to create a homeschooling path through the critical early years that will set your child up for longer-term success.

If you know your child won’t enjoy reading Harry Potter in 4th grade, even though the neighbor’s son or his own sister did, don’t force it. You risk turning your child off to reading altogether if she is forced to read books she can’t read.

To nurture a love of reading in your struggling reader, it has to be “just right” books. Eventually, he will have the confidence to pick up anything and read it.

Similarly, if other families in your support group are loving a particular curriculum or book series, don’t be tempted. Stick to your plan and take the long view. Once your child has a strong foundation and loves learning, all of this is possible in good time

Mistake #6. Under-rate The Value of Confidence and Self-Esteem

Confidence begets confidence. If your child is confident, she will be a learning risk-taker, try new things, and shrug off learning setbacks instead of taking them to heart.

This is sometimes called the Matthew Effect, where good learners outpace struggling learners in part because they lean into learning; they know they are good at learning, so they want to do more of it.

The fastest way to erode confidence is failure. For instance, giving your child a book he’s not ready for.

If you see your child resenting the curriculum because it contains words he does not understand, you need to weigh the value of continuing it against its possible long-term impact on your child’s connection to learning and love of learning.

Gemm Learning provides structured, adaptive homeschool programs for autistic kids, helping many students feel successful and build confidence.

Similarly, if you see your child tiring during the day, there may be too much content. Children with processing delays work much harder to understand what they hear, so their stamina is lower.

A few tips on keeping your child’s confidence tank filled:

• Celebrate Small Wins: Reinforce effort and progress regularly to counteract low self-esteem.
• Reframe “Mistakes: Normalize struggle as part of learning. Model positive self-talk.
• Avoid Comparisons: Especially with siblings or peers—focus on individual growth.

Praise effort, not outcomes; let your child dictate answers when writing is overwhelming; and offer choices, such as which topic to start with or which book to read.

Another effective strategy is strength-based teaching, using strengths to build weaknesses. For instance, reading off a song sheet is a tremendous way to build reading fluency if your child is musical.

Mistake #7. Not Getting Help Early Enough If Learning Struggles Persist

Once a child is middle school age and older, the curriculum broadens, and there is far less time for learning to learn.

So, if your child is in 3rd grade and not reading fluently or in 4th grade and not reading with comprehension—reading milestones for all ages here—then you should seek help.

You have two basic choices: added tutoring or an intervention. Tutoring is extra practice, more of what you are already doing. An intervention addresses the underlying cognitive skill gaps holding your child back.

Most children need a little help learning to read, but figure it out eventually. Early intervention is really helpful for those who don’t.

If your child has a speech delay, ear infections, or a family history of learning delays, early intervention means 1st or 2nd grade.

If there were no early clues of a learning delay, but your child is avoiding reading, not fluent in 3rd grade or not comprehending in 4th grade, early intervention means 3rd or 4th grade.

Gemm Learning provides homeschool programs for auditory processing delays and reading interventions for children aged 5 and older, using the Fast ForWord cognitive and reading program series. Call us at 877.914.4366 to find out if we can help your child.