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This site is dedicated to helping parents of children with disabilities feel empowered and supported enough to help their children realize their truest potential (e.g., strengths, social and emotional challenges, etc.). They also educate parents on legal rights in order for them to become advocates for their children.

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We are dedicated to helping parents realize their children's significant gifts and talents, and demonstrating that with their love, guidance, and the right support, their children can live happy and productive lives.

Mission:
Our mission is to help children with learning and attention differences reach their full potential by inspiring, educating and empowering parents to help their children succeed.

Vision:
Smart Kids envisions a world where all children, regardless of their learning challenges, achieve their full potential.

Goals:
We are committed to empowering parents to support their children's strengths, interests and abilities, to understand their learning and attention differences, and to address their social and emotional challenges. We are also committed to educating parents about their children's legal rights, to help them become effective advocates for their children in school and in the community.

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We are dedicated to helping parents realize their children's significant gifts and talents, and demonstrating that with their love, guidance, and the right support, their children can live happy and productive lives. Mission: Our mission is to help children with learning and attention differences reach their full potential by inspiring, educating and empowering parents to help their children succeed.

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Daniel Dage is a SPED teacher and a father of two boys with Autism. His blog features an abundance of resources for SPED workers and parents of children with special needs.

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I hope my co-teacher doesn't see this. But in case she does, I'll say here what I've already told her and the other pre-calc teacher with whom I share (virtual) classroom space: They do a superb job at teaching students and accommodating my lack of mathematical prowess. They are amazing teachers, and the most wonderful co-teachers anyone could ask for. They are top notch people who love students and love what they teach. Which is to say, they love math.

I do not love math. But I do give the math teachers that I have co-taught with high marks for moving me into a space where I don't hate it. Much. This is high praise, considering where I started several years ago. I have almost always hated math. And most of my caseload students hate math as well as most of my fellow special education teachers. Fleeing a math-intense curriculum is one reason many of us became special educators. We loved teaching, and loved kids and some of us even loved science. But we hated math.

I'm currently lobbying to create and sponsor a "I Hate Math" club for our school. The idea is to have a club that is like a support group akin to those support groups for people having to go through chemotherapy. We don't like it, but we have to do it. We have to endure, and we have to survive. And we can do it much better if we do it together rather than fall apart. We can become math survivors.

I'm pretty well qualified for such an endeavor because not only do I have a lot of anxiety, fear, loathing and anger toward the subject, I'm also somewhat compelled to be around it more than I would like. Which is to say, almost all the time. This describes a lot of the students I encounter in our schools and in my own family. Outside of math teachers, engineers and a few other oddballs, I'm very hard pressed to to find people who really and truly like mathematics. There are a few of us who like logical thinking and may enjoy an occasional mathematical puzzle ( Sudoku anyone?) but when we start talking about calculating slope, synthetic division, imaginary numbers, cosines and radians we start entering that dark distasteful zone that begins putting people off. It can even have many of the same symptoms as anxiety due to chemotherapy. I've talked to students who became physically ill every day before entering their math classes. Math phobia is a real thing to many, many students.

I like how a math educator, Dan Meyer, introduced his Ted Talk :

"I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it but is forced by law to buy it."

Almost every school teacher could identify to this on some level, but math teachers are especially vulnerable to being abused by students who hate their subject. I might have abused a math teacher or two in my own way back in the day. And right now, wherever they are, they are having a wry smile at my expense. I would never have predicted that I would be near a math classroom at any time after graduation and now I get to endure much of what my old math teachers did.

But for all my discomfort with the subject during my own middle and high school years, it is no where near what today's students are being subjected to.

The above is an image of the math curriculum for a school in another state, but closely matches what is in place in the state of Georgia and several other states. By the time a student is in 11th or 12th grade, they are expected to be taking either pre-calculus or calculus. For those of you with children in school, let that settle for a minute. There is no alternate plan here. This IS the state curriculum.

Recently, the state of Georgia did announce a change in its sequence that does offer a less daunting option and you can see the pdf here. I will applaud a move in the right direction, especially for our students with disabilities. However, Algebra II is still required in order to get a high school diploma in the state of Georgia. And where is consumer math?

While researching for this post, I looked for articles and discourse on this topic and found a dearth of articles addressing the question of whether or not we should be requiring every high school student to master Algebra II (let alone pre-calculus) in order to get a high school diploma. The best one that I could find was a report issued by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) that issued a report looking at the requirements for admission into community colleges back in 2013. They had this to say about the high school math curriculum currently being pushed by most states:

"Mastery of Algebra II is widely thought to be a prerequisite for success in college and careers. Our research shows that that is not so... Based on our data, one cannot make the case that high school graduates must be proficient in Algebra II to be ready for college and careers. The high school mathematics curriculum is now centered on the teaching of a sequence of courses leading to calculus that includes Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus and Calculus. However, fewer than five percent of American workers and an even smaller percentage of community college students will ever need to master the courses in this sequence in their college or in the workplace... they should not be required courses in our high schools. To require these courses in high school is to deny to many students the opportunity to graduate high school because they have not mastered a sequence of mathematics courses they will never need. In the face of these findings, the policy of requiring a passing score on an Algebra II exam for high school graduation simply cannot be justified."

The odd thing about this report is that it is written in support of the Common core Curriculum which puts me in a very odd place. I'm not a fan of the Common Core, largely for reasons that you can watch in this documentary on the subject.

I have experience with this on 3 different levels: as a person who is mathematically challenged, as a parent and as a teacher of students with disabilities.

As a person who was difficult to motivate during his middle school years, especially in the area of mathematics, I am very thankful I grew up when I did. Namely that I was not required to master Algebra II in order to graduate high school or even college. If that were the case, I would not have a college degree, let alone a Master's degree, and it might be doubtful I would have gotten through high school. I would have done what I see more and more of the students that I teach do: I would have quit. I have no doubt in my mind that I would have taken this option. I started out well enough, getting an 'A' in my first quarter of Algebra I. Next Quarter I got a B, and then I got a 'C' and then I got a 'D'. In Geometry I started with a 'B' my first quarter, then a 'C' and then...well I finished the second semester with an 'F'. A lot of this was due to motivation, but in those days there was an option to make up that math credit by taking business math, which I did. It was a class that was infinitely more fun and practical where I learned about amortization and interest rates and where I was the one to figure out how to program the school's new Apple I computer to do my homework. I loved computers back then and taught the thing how to calculate my interest homework. Visicalc hadn't been invented yet, or at least no one I knew had heard of it.

Now I have a son of my own who, unfortunately, has inherited his father's rich loathing of math. But he has a more determined mother than I did, and he's probably going to finish with an 'A'. However that 'A' in Algebra I is probably taking 10 years off of my wife's life in the form of all the frustration and the constant strife and battling. He still has 3 more years to go and at this rate, I might need to put an extra life insurance policy on my wife. At the very least, I'm going to be bound to staying in a job with good health insurance.

Like so many of my students, my son has modest goals for his future. If he were 10 years younger, he would not even be on track for a regular education diploma much less doing and succeeding in algebra I. In this way, inclusion has been a good thing for many students and does challenge and offer them a good education. However the focus on college readiness is going to doom a lot of the students who have less determined or educated parents. He could learn and be very good at a trade and really that's all he wants to do. He wants a good job that allows him to afford his appetite for all things having to do with model railroading. However, there are very few vocational programs in high schools anymore. The arts have also been marginalized because of the pressure generated by the testing culture.

The bottom line for many of our students is that the bar for a high school diploma has been raised to such an extent, especially with the math curriculum, that too many of them are not going to make it. They will get discouraged and quit all because of a barrier that has been put in place needlessly. According to the NCEE study, less than 5% of all students will require much more than Algebra I in order to function well in their jobs and careers.

I'm currently engaged in a bit of a battle, trying to save as many of my students as possible, and enable them to reach that finish line. They want to be mechanics, welders, seamstresses, healthcare workers, hair dressers, farmers and truck drivers. These are all skilled positions and careers where they will need some additional post-secondary training. But in order to get that they are faced with a stark and scary road that leads through Algebra II and possibly pre-calculus. They struggle massively just to make it through coordinate algebra, which is even harder than the algebra that I had in 9th grade. The pass rates on the End Of Course tests in math in the state of Georgia are absolutely dismal, with 60-70% of all students taking the exam failing it. For students with disabilities, the failure rate is closer to 90%. There is a provision for students with disabilities in Georgia to follow an alternate curriculum that can rescue them from the Algebra II trap. However, there seems to be some question among some districts as to how to apply this, and some are very slow in applying it. In the meantime, the river of students continues to flow through the system and many of them are opting out by dropping out. Applying this rule fairly early on when it is obvious to the parents, the student, the teacher and the IEP team that this student will quit or fail school before succeeding in Algebra II can give them an early lifeline in helping to persevere through the rest of the courses. Knowing that there is an end point that doesn't have to end in a needless mathematical death march can help keep the doors open for many of our students.

Tags: algebra, disabilities, math curriculum, math phobia, math teachers, mathematics, mathematics instruction, pre-calculus, students with disabilities

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I hope my co-teacher doesn't see this. But in case she does, I'll say here what I've already told her and the other pre-calc teacher with whom I share (virtual) classroom space: They do a superb job at teaching students and accommodating my lack of mathematical prowess.

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BLOOM collects blogs, websites, links, and resources for professionals and parents of children with disabilities and chronic health conditions. There are blogs on Autism, Disability & Race, and Education.

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Developmental disabilities and Autism

Costello syndrome and Asperger syndrome

Cerebral palsy, preemie, tube-fed with real food

Cerebral palsy, augmentative communication, service dog

A specialty legal clinic based in Toronto.

Disability rights journalist David M. Perry

Empowering black disabled women

A fascinating series of videos with parents of children with disabilities and people with disabilities. By Jennifer Johannesen.

Publishers of educational materials for people with disabilities and their care providers.

News stories on disability

Large U.K. parenting blog with special-needs section

Opinion series on disability

"The Social Emotional Enhancement and Development website aims to provide evidence based resources to promote social emotional competencies of children with special needs. The content of the website is managed by the Psycho-social team at BC Centre for Ability."

Christian communities that foster friendship with people with intellectual disabilities, in 80 countries

A project of the B.C. Brain Injury Association

Medical humanities journal

Hospital physician writing on medicine and teaching

Rare diseases, chromosome 12 microdeletion, skeletal dysplasia, lung restriction, jokes!

Uncontrolled seizures; transition to adulthood

Spinal muscular atrophy and travel

Know of a blog or website that you think we should include? Want to report an error or dead link? Please email us at lkinross@hollandbloorview.ca.

Note: Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital does not endorse the views nor guarantee the accuracy of information on third-party sites

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Developmental disabilities and Autism Costello syndrome and Asperger syndrome Cerebral palsy, preemie, tube-fed with real food Cerebral palsy, augmentative communication, service dog A specialty legal clinic based in Toronto. Disability rights journalist David M. Perry Empowering black disabled women A fascinating series of videos with parents of children with disabilities and people with disabilities.

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Katie’s blog features personal experiences of helping parents and children with special needs, so they may thrive at home, school, and church. She uses her experiences with her children and family to talk to parents in order to help them with any questions they may have.

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My kindergarten teacher had a special pen she used every day for grading papers. On one end was a regular ball-point red pen, but on the other end was a smiley-face stamp. She would carry it around as we did our work, and if we got everything right, she would turn the pen around press that pretty stamp on our paper. But, if we made an error, she used the ball-point side to scrawl a sad-face.

The first time I saw this magical pen, I silently vowed to get all smiley faces the whole year-long. I achieved this goal until one winter afternoon, when I counted six snowmen instead of five...and a sad face was drawn quickly on my math paper. Eric P., who sat at my table gasped and said, "Ohhhhhhhhh, Katie got a sad face!" I gulped and willed the tears away.

And thus, my terrible tango with Perfect began.This push-me-pull-you dance always led to a short-lived exhilaration, often mixed with exhaustion and tears and sometimes, great emptiness. And still, I'd dust myself off and dance on with this fairly unrelenting and overpowering partner. This continued through undergraduate and graduate school, and into my teaching career. Maturity and time slowed the dance down a bit, though occasionally, Perfect would strike up a tempo that would push me again into a dizzying pursuit...
The perfect dinner party. The perfect thesis. The perfect house. The perfect lesson.
However, nothing could have prepared me for the Ultimate Promenade of Perfection into which I entered on March 21, 1994:
Motherhood.
I was completely overwhelmed by the intensity of competition around raising children. Play groups felt more like beauty and talent competitions; discussions revolved around whose child was first in reaching milestones and accomplishing great feats. I felt an almost-primal need to protect my children from the clutches of the Perfect culture, only to discover its pervasiveness: a mainstream magazine recently dubbed parenting as "The Most Competitive Sport in America."

The conversations I heard at dinner parties and school functions were heavily laced with mentions of Perfect. You know what I'm talking about ...the kinds of statements about travel teams and talent scouts that, in my less-secure moments, make me want to thoroughly examine where I went wrong with my obviously-average offspring. Or throw up. Or both.

Still, when I come to my senses, I firmly resist strangling my kids with superlatives, knowing that they'll never be the smartest or the fastest or the strongest and the best in everything... and that's okay.

It's taken me a long time to learn this, but Imperfect yields a bumper crop of gifts that Perfect could never offer:
Persistence.
Resilience.
Tolerance.
Appreciation.
Humility

If my children were perfect, they would have no need to develop any of these qualities. If they were perfect, they might miss out on the unique relationships that develop from cooperation and loyalty and mutual dependence.

If they were perfect, they'd have no need for me...
and they'd have no need for Him.
So, no thanks, Perfect. When it comes to parenting, I'll sit this one out. I'll watch my perfectly imperfect children, (who were born of a most-imperfect mother!) as they become just exactly who God planned them to be...
...and I'll dance with Joy.

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My Children Aren't Perfect (and I'm dancing with joy )

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My kindergarten teacher had a special pen she used every day for grading papers. On one end was a regular ball-point red pen, but on the other end was a smiley-face stamp. She would carry it around as we did our work, and if we got everything right, she would turn the pen around press that pretty...

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Firefly features real life stories, issues, and daily experiences of special needs parents and healthcare professionals. It offers multiple resources, blogs, and even podcasts created by parents and professionals of their journey with children with special needs.

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Evelyn Yang discusses her experiences with her special needs child and how that has shaped her view on life and humanity. Many of her videos include her special needs son and her parenting techniques that focus on ensuring he can be successful in the future.

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Parenting Tips & Parenting Advice for Children with Autism and Special Needs

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Parenting Tips & Parenting Advice for Children with Autism and Special Needs

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Dr. May Barbera discusses parenting advice for children with Autism or other special needs and teaches parents proper skills to effectively help their child’s development.

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Parenting Tips & Parenting Advice for Children with Autism and Special Needs

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Parenting a Child with Special Needs | Babble Stories by Babble

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Parenting a Child with Special Needs | Babble Stories by Babble

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Babble partnered with parents of children with special needs to talk about “the good, the bad, and the sticky” parenting. Real life parents give types, recipes, style inspiration, and DIYS intended for other parents who have a child with disabilities.

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Parenting a Child With Special Needs | Babble Stories by Babble

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Special Needs Parents Tips + Habits | Helpful Tips for Parents of Child with Disabilities

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Special Needs Parents Tips + Habits | Helpful Tips for Parents of Child with Disabilities

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Ale is a special needs parent and uses her experiences to share tips and habits she finds helpful. Some topics included are getting healthy, organized, and gratitude.

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Special Needs Parents Tips + Habits | Helpful Tips for Parents of Child with Disabilities

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Rob Gorski is a dad of 3 sons on the Autism spectrum and candidly writes about the good and “not-so-good” experiences of his daily life.

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I've haven't written anything super meaningful in a long time. The truth is that a I've written so much over the years that I've sorta burned out. There's something like 12,500 articles on this blog and I've written 99% of them. The rest is guest or sponsored content.

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Kate’s blog features her daily experiences as a mother of a son with severe, nonverbal Autism. Her blog is a safe place for parents to celebrate the unique challenges that come with parenting a special needs child. She shares personal stories as well as stories that families submit to her in order to build support, encouragement, a safe space to vent, and most importantly, hope.

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Welcome to Finding Cooper's Voice.

My mission has always been to show the beauty in severe autism and build a safe community for families to share the unique challenges of parenting a special needs child as well as celebrate the unique joys.

I started this blog before my oldest son was diagnosed with autism. At that time, I just needed to write. I needed to get the words and feelings out.

Over time, this website evolved into an amazing community of parents, teachers, therapists, grandparents and caregivers that are looking to find support, encouragement, a safe space to vent and above all...hope.

If you follow us, you will find pieces of the beautiful parts of our world - My absolutely beautiful children, all three of them, our journey with nonverbal, severe autism, raising babies, marriage, love and life.

Our cast of characters

Cooper, a train loving, joyful, nonverbal, amazing little boy. He is truly changing the face of severe autism. Sawyer, an athletic, busy, social, negotiating love bug, and baby Harbor. The little one that brought us all together. He wakes up every single day smiling and laughing. And he truly believes his brother's hung the moon.

My husband Jamie, a one-of-a-kind guy, and me, Kate, the founder and writer for Finding Cooper's Voice also make an appearance.

I also share guest posts from moms, dads, caregivers, and others who have stories to share.

Lastly, recently I launched a fan subscription page. I did this so I could build a community where people who TRULY care about learning more about autism and CARE about my family could have an even closer relationship with me and my kids. I offer exclusive videos that I don't feel comfortable sharing with millions of people. Topics include marriage, sibling guilt, medicating, etc. I also do weekly Facebook Live Q and A's and giveaways. Come join us and build your village in a safe, friendly, supportive place. We'd love to have you. Click to learn more: https://www.facebook.com/becomesupporter/772295979579532/

I encourage you to follow us on Facebook as well as Instagram.

For media or sponsorship requests, email me at [email protected] .

Finding Cooper's Voice is a safe, humorous, caring and honest place where you can celebrate the unique challenges of parenting a special needs child. Because you're never alone in the struggles you face. And once you find your people, your allies, your village....all the challenges and struggles will seem just a little bit easier.

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Welcome to Finding Cooper's Voice. My mission has always been to show the beauty in severe autism and build a safe community for families to share the unique challenges of parenting a special needs child as well as celebrate the unique joys. I started this blog before my oldest son was diagnosed with autism.

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Alicia is a mom of 2 children with Autism. She began her blog when she looked online for personal blogs on raising multiple children on the spectrum and could not find any. She is an Autism and parenting coach who shares her expertise in parenting children with/without Autism to help other parents.

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Parenting a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder | The Mom Kind

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Parenting a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Help your child to overcome the overwhelmed of circumstances and behave positively.

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What It Means to Be A Special Needs Mom 

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What It Means to Be A Special Needs Mom 

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Kristi Rieger Campbell shares her experience as a parent of a child with special needs. She highlights the joys and challenges of mother hood. Her story is relatable and give an honest, raw, and uplifting look at what parenting a special needs child is.

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Kristi Rieger Campbell reading "What It Means To Be A Special Needs Mom"