The following suggestions may be helpful for parents who are working with a child who has a learning disability at home:

• Try to establish a structure and routine for work sessions at home. Work with your child at the same time and at the same place in the house as much as possible. It is more important to practice for a short period of time daily than a long time once a week.
  
• Remember that it will not be possible to work on everything your child is having trouble with at once. Talk with the teacher and find out what is most important to work on at home and start with this.
  
• Work with your child’s teacher to set up a system that will let you know what the homework assignments are. Monitor your child’s completion of homework.
  
• Keep in mind that your child will not be able to learn more difficult skills until he or she has mastered the easier skills that lead to them. Provide a great deal of extra practice and repetition on the easier skills to ensure that your child masters them.
  
• Try to have realistic expectations about how quickly progress will be made. Introduce unknown material slowly, for example, two new sight words each week. Working on a few new items along with others your child knows is more effective than working on just new items.
  
• Find out from the teacher how a skill is taught in the classroom and try to use the same method or strategy at home. For example, don’t tell your child to “sound out” a word while he or she is reading orally if that is not the approach the teacher uses at school .
  
• Try to present information and practice skills in many different ways. For example, practice basic reading words on flash cards, in easy books, and using a computer software program.
  
• As much as possible practice skills in a “hands on” or game like format. Making the practice session more fun will increase your child’s motivation. For instance, allow your child to write the spelling words on the sidewalk with chalk or complete dot-to-dot puzzles to practice the counting sequence of numbers.
  
• Also remember that many skills and concepts can be taught through daily activities at home. For instance, you can work on counting and the idea of how many more or less while your child sets the table as well as reinforce the concept of fractions if he or she helps you with cooking.
  
• Use some way of keeping track of your child’s progress so that he or she can see gains and progress that is made. For example, you and your child could keep a chart of the number of words learned or put each word on a card and put them in a “word bank.”
  
• Keep in mind that just getting items correct is not enough. Work on quick, automatic recognition of basic skills such as letters, sounds, numbers, sight words, and math facts.
  
• If motivation is a problem, don’t be afraid to use incentives or rewards. It is usually best to make these dependent on the child trying and putting forth good effort rather than performance.