Homeschool Program for Auditory Processing Disorder

APD Homeschool Curriculum

Concerns about insufficient help at school and noisy classrooms are pushing some parents of children with auditory processing disorder to a homeschool track. However, teaching a child with auditory processing disorder is a challenge.

Getting your child out of a noisy environment is a good start, as background noise creates difficulty for children with APD. But that’s not enough. Auditory processing disorder undermines reading and learning, and it won’t go away on its own. It needs treatment.

If you are not sure if your child’s processing delays are serious or not, check out APD symptoms here. 

Adaptive Exercises To Help Auditory Processing Delays

Our APD curriculum for homeschool is not a workaround; it’s not regular curriculum content presented visually or in other ways to work around a child’s auditory processing delays.

Instead, it’s a series of programs and exercises that directly address auditory processing and related deficits.

Homeschool families want their children to be independent learners who do not need coping tools or extra help. The only way to do that is to remediate the APD. Not to manage around it, but to address it once and for all.

Our program addresses all aspects of APD with intensive, adaptive exercises that build the foundations of language, learning, and reading.

Think of us as a homeschool curriculum for auditory processing disorder, with evidence-based APD software and experienced professional guidance to support your child.

More Auditory Processing Stimulation Needed

Developmental delays cause auditory processing difficulties — your APD 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. That is often 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, which is usually sufficient to improve auditory processing skills.

Is It Auditory Processing?

While students have different symptoms because of differing IQs, personality traits, prior interventions, educational experience, and many other factors, many reading and learning difficulties stem from the same problem: an inability to process language efficiently.

Language is incredibly complex, especially English. 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 learning.

APD Impact on Learning

Strong auditory processing in children correlates 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 affects 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 limits your child’s capacity to think about what they are hearing, connect what is being said to other knowledge, make inferences, and, most importantly, think critically. This is called metacognition — the ability to self-correct and analyze while listening or reading. Metacognition is a critical learning skill that can make the difference between passing and failing in high school.
• Learning is exhausting. If your child is working hard just to understand your words, think how exhausting that must be, all day long. Understandably, this exhaustion makes it hard to enjoy learning and 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. Most reading problems stem from an auditory processing difficulty.
Homeschool dyslexia reading curriculum

Auditory Processing Programs

Helping with 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 APD

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