
Teaching SEN kids at home – English and Waking Up!
April 1 2020
Teaching can be challenging
Teaching SEN kids at home is challenging at the best of times. We’ll be posting here regularly with ideas on teaching SEN kids at home. This post gives you some ideas on how to turn waking up into an easy English lesson.
The Covid-19 crisis has sent us all home and we are suddenly being expected to be parent, teacher and, often, employee all the same time. It is difficult for anyone but if your child can’t or won’t work by themselves it is even harder. It is easy to feel that you are failing but you aren’t and you aren’t alone. You can fit learning into your daily lives and you don’t have to be sitting at a table or desk to do it!
English and Waking Up!
Below are just a few ideas on how you can fit English into waking up in the morning. Try just one idea at a time to keep things interesting. If you try to do everything in one go, you will just get stressed out and your child will protest!

Your child may communicate with you in different ways, such as sign language, pictures and cards or apps. You can adapt any of the suggestions below to suit your situation. If you need some help, just get in touch with us here: https://wecanaccess.com/contact/
Daily Activity | English Topic | Learning ideas |
Waking up | Descriptive language | Ask: How are you feeling today? How did you sleep? |
Writing | With your finger, draw a letter or word on your child’s back and ask them to guess what it is. | |
Washing | Descriptive language | How does the water feel? How does the toothbrush feel? |
Writing | Ask your child to write letters/ words on a steamy mirror | |
Reading | Looking for letters and words on the labels of bottles in the bathroom. Ask your child to read letters/ words you write on a steamy mirror | |
Getting dressed | Descriptive language | Ask: What colour are your clothes? (You can extend this by encouraging a comparison to something else. e.g. it is red like a tomato.) How do your clothes feel? (e.g. soft, itchy, comfy, tight) |
Spoken language | Ask your child to give you instructions on how to help them dress e.g. open my sock drawer, take out my pink socks, put one sock on each foot. |
Hopefully we have given you a few ideas to get you started. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at fitting Maths, English, Science and PSHE into different activities over the day for teaching SEN kids at home. So do keep checking back with us.
Please leave a comment below! We want to hear how you got on or any ideas you have come up with for teaching SEN kids at home!
About Us
Emma Bara has taught about environmental topics and science for years, running whole school education projects, teacher training, science clubs for primary school kids and GCSE Science tutoring. David Bara has years of experience as a SEN teacher and Senior Lecturer of Special Educational Needs. They are the Co-Founders of WeCanAccess.com.

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