Homeschool Program for APD

Helping auditory processing difficulties remotely

Concerns about insufficient help at school and noisy classrooms are pushing some parents of children with auditory processing disorder to a homeschool track. However, simply getting out of a noisy environment is not not enough, auditory processing disorder undermines reading and learning — it needs to be worked on as part of your daily homeschool routine.

If you are not sure if your child’s processing delays are serious or not, check out our auditory processing disorder symptoms

APD Homeschool Supplemental Curriculum

Homeschool families want their child to be an independent learner that does not need coping tools or extra help.

That is also the goal of the Gemm Learning homeschool program. We go after the source of auditory processing disorder. Our program works on all aspects of APD using intensive, adaptive exercises that work on the building blocks of language, learning and reading.

Think of us as an auditory processing disorder homeschool curriculum, with the software and professional guidance to help your child.

Practice Makes Permanent

Auditory processing difficulties are caused by development delays — your CAPD child needs more language processing practice to refine processing skills than is currently available in daily life. Children hear 30-45 million words in the first four years of life. In most cases that is enough to build the processing skills needed for listening, language, reading and writing.

However, your child might need more. This is where our software can help. It provides processing practice, the equivalent of hearing millions of words in a few weeks, in most cases sufficient to bring auditory processing skills up to where they need to be.

Is It Auditory Processing?

While students have different symptoms due to differing IQs, personality traits, prior interventions, educational experience, and a host of other factors many reading and learning difficulties are caused by the same problem, namely, an inability to process language efficiently.

Language is incredibly complex, particularly the English language. Language processing and reading are demanding skills. Not surprisingly, many students fall short. This is why auditory processing problems lie at the heart of so many reading and learning issues.

While the brain is constantly trying to self-improve, meaning that over time, these delays tend to fade, it can take years.  Left untreated, auditory processing delays can undermine a love of reading and a love of learning.

APD Impact on Learning

Strong auditory processing in children correlate to grades, reading, homework behavior and enjoyment of learning. It is a critical skill that underpins all learning.

The consequences of auditory processing disorder on early learning are relatively obvious. If your child is not hearing you or his/her peers clearly, learning will be delayed. It also impacts expressive language — vocabulary, articulation and relating stories — often referred to as a language processing disorder.

Over time almost all children with auditory processing disorder learn to listen more accurately, but only at great cost. They learn that they can process more accurately if they concentrate intently. There are two major problems with this coping strategy:

• Thinking while listening is weakened. The need to concentrate on listening means that your child has limited capacity to think about what he/she is hearing, to connect what is being said to other knowledge, to make inferences, and most importantly to think critically. This is called metacognition — the ability to self-correct and analyze while listening or reading. Metacognition is a critical learning skill that is the difference between a pass or fail in high school
• Learning is exhausting. If your child is working hard just to understand your words as a homeschool teacher, think how exhausting that must be; and all day long. Understandably, this exhaustion factor makes it hard to enjoy learning and difficult to maintain focus. Not surprisingly, children with auditory processing disorder often end up on ADD medicine.

Auditory Processing and Reading

A major target of our auditory processing disorder homeschool curriculum is reading and reading comprehension.  APD impacts phonological awareness — hearing the individual sounds that make up words — an essential reading skill. In fact, most reading problems stem from an auditory processing difficulty.
Homeschool reading program

Auditory Processing Programs

Helping auditory processing has become a lot easier since the launch of Fast ForWord software a few years ago. It is an interactive software that isolates and exercises the various components of auditory processing individually, helping children and adults learn to process efficiently at natural language speed.
Our treatment for auditory processing disorder

Gemm Learning’s homeschool programs are particularly helpful for reading difficulties. However, because they work at a fundamental level they also help learning issues that homeschool parents struggle to find help for, including attention stamina and focus, expressive and receptive language — listening skills — and study habits. Our program is also popular for homeschool autistic children.