Educational resources and websites to support your child’s learning journey
Dive down the Internet rabbit hole, and you will find so many educational resources available to help your child learn. It can be hard to know where to start though. We’ve gathered some of our favourites and grouped them into learning areas, for you to begin to explore. (just click the header of each description below to head to the website).
GENERAL
This website offers free special needs learning activities, including games, lesson plans for gifted children, ADHD resources and Asperger’s Syndrome activities.
This website acts as a Special Education portal, with a huge collection of links to sites, other resources, forums and support groups. It suggests resources for specific disabilities from a range of Australian and International sites.
The Home Education Network website is based on homeschooling but offers a variety of resources that support any at-home learning.
One of the resources from the HEN website is ABC Education. This website directs you to thousands of free ABC educational resources for primary and secondary students, including videos, games, apps and programs.
LANGUAGE AND LITERACY
Parents and special education teachers often have difficulty finding new ways to inspire a love for learning in children with learning disabilities. The Internet has become one of the best resources for discovering exciting and entertaining activities for children. Educational websites assist children with learning disabilities master basic skills in literacy and numeracy, as well as more advanced concepts. This website directs users to 12 sites that are useful for children with a range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, and visual motor deficit.
Published by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, this is an excellent resource for children with learning disabilities like dyslexia. This website records free videos of narrators reading children’s books aloud. Students develop their literacy skills by following along with the text as they listen.
Reading Rockets is an award-winning website devoted to providing research-based activities that help struggling readers. There is an extensive collection of lessons centred on fluency, oral language, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and other literacy skills. There are also themed booklists to get children excited about reading.
Skwirk is an online destination and learning environment for students to use as a resource tool for homework and assignments. Hosting over 18,000 resources, Skwirk is used in Australia and all around the world. It covers English, Maths, Science, History, Geography and Commerce from Foundation to Year 10, and allows you to access work from different levels as needed to modify learning for your child’s individual needs.
SOCIAL SKILLS
Autism Awareness
The Autism Awareness website is a place to find information about teaching children with autism, how to set up spaces in the home for a child with autism and where to find books and apps helpful in educating children with autism. It links to a comprehensive range of websites with further useful information and resources.
Do2learn is one website from the Autism Awareness list. It’s a popular site, providing users with thousands of free pages of social skills and behavioural regulation activities and guidance, learning songs and games and communication cards. The
The Inclusive Class is a collection of blog posts, articles and other resources to promote a classroom or home learning environment of inclusion. Its rich material helps parents and teachers create a more supportive school environment for their students with special needs.
Children and adolescents with special needs (including Autism Spectrum Disorder) often learn more easily when supported with visual strategies including books and videos. The website My Diffability provides many fantastic books and DVDs to support learning, in particular, social skills. The resource collection for social skills and blog both have helpful information for special needs families.
