How two parents approached CVI and homeschool

A young boy with curly hair sits at a homeschool desk, under a sign that says Mommy School

Erin Curler sat alongside her son Eski as he attended virtual school during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. “He had just gotten a CVI diagnosis, and so none of us had a very big picture of how it was affecting him. I would have to sit there with him through hours and hours of virtual second grade. And it was just so eye-opening to me.”

Aside from the emotional and technological challenges facing every student and teacher at that time, CVI caused additional barriers for Eski, who was “getting absolutely nothing out of virtual school.” Erin sensed that things hadn’t been going well for him before the shutdowns either. “I would ask about his progress, and the school would respond, ‘Oh, no, he’s fine.’ I was used to them not telling me anything, but they still refused to communicate with me, even when I was the one sitting with him all day during virtual school.”

Erin says they muddled along in virtual school because the school system provided some in-person services that seemed important for Eski but “if I could go back and do it again, I would just have pulled him out sooner because it was a lot of wasted time for him and for me.”

Christi Boomer’s son, Drew, struggled with traditional in-person kindergarten. The school team didn’t understand CVI and the class had some teacher turnover. “It was a miserable year, and it broke my heart because I was a kindergarten teacher. Kindergarten is supposed to be the best year.”

Drew had frequent CVI meltdowns due to school anxiety. Christi says, “I knew in my Mommy heart that something was wrong and I continued to let it go longer than it should have. He got to the point where he was eloping out of the school and chasing after me. I could hear him screaming when I was a block away.”

That’s why Christi found school closures “a blessing in disguise.” It allowed her to do more hands-on learning like games and cooking with her children, both of whom have IEPs. Once virtual school opened in their district, she asked for permission to continue using projects to teach her kids, sending in samples of the work to demonstrate learning. “The school was gracious enough to allow me to continue to do that,” she says.

Erin's son Eski sits at a cluttered desk for virtual school with a laptop during the pandemic lockdown.

The next year, Christi retained Drew so he could master the kindergarten curriculum. “We did a quarter online and watching him struggle every single day was extremely frustrating. He couldn’t see what was being presented on the Chromebook and was missing instructions. He was truly lost, and he shut down. And this was stuff that had been presented the year before.” That was the turning point for Christi. She pulled Drew from virtual school and committed fully to a homeschool program.

Parents cite a lack of open communication with the school, misunderstandings about CVI and how to accommodate for it, poor academic performance, and social traumas as some of the reasons they homeschool their students with CVI. While the pandemic catapulted most of us into the role of homeschool teachers, parents like Erin and Christi embraced the change as a solution to the challenges their children experienced with school.

Erin continues to homeschool Eski. Christi homeschooled Drew until she found a project-based charter school to meet his needs. Both have rich advice to offer to anyone thinking about homeschooling their student with CVI.

A day in the life of a homeschool mom

So what’s it like to run a homeschool program? Erin’s average day looks like this:

The morning starts with wake-up calls and getting Erin’s daughter off to school. Eski occupies himself with homework during this time.
Lessons begin around 9 a.m. and are punctuated by outdoor walks or a snack.
School ends around 1 p.m.
The rest of the afternoon is for therapies and activities. Eski also spends time each afternoon with his companion, who was his paraprofessional in the public school he used to attend.
Eski is tired by the end of the week, so Erin stacks appointments on Thursdays and Fridays, keeping his freshest days for academics.
Two to three afternoons a week, Erin goes to her office located in a co-working space to do the indirect work required – lesson planning, materials preparation, research, and asynchronous professional development courses.
After the kids go to bed, Erin tries to stick to only an hour more of prep work and to “accept the fact that you will never be as prepared as you want to be.”
School runs for six to eight weeks, followed by a week off. During the break, Eski’s companion comes in full time and Erin spends about 40 hours getting ahead for the next session.

How to prepare for homeschooling

You can tell from Erin’s schedule that the prep work can be grueling. Christi agrees. Even when her kids were in a traditional school setting, she spent three hours a night and weekends preparing materials for Drew. This was in addition to the time she spent reteaching and reinforcing academic concepts at home. “It was a ton of work every week,” she understates.

Erin confesses she’s trying to be strict with herself and to only put in an hour of work after her children go to bed. “It’s been quite a few years of homeschooling, so if I’m not totally prepared, I can wing it. It’s just less enjoyable for me and less effective for him.”

Both Christi and Erin highly recommend pursuing professional development courses in CVI and education, which can prepare you with many ideas for teaching your student. Since Erin does not have a background as an educator, she says “the very best thing I did for our homeschooling was a lot of professional development in education.”

But she didn’t wait to homeschool just because she didn’t have all the answers. Erin managed a lot of asynchronous learning in tandem with teaching. “I did a solid year of CVI research and really learning all about the characteristics and absorbing every little scrap of information I can find from books and websites. After that, I started delving deep into subject-specific professional development. I spent a year learning about how to teach reading and then I spent a year learning how to teach math.” She followed all of this up with research on how to teach writing and the neuroscience of education.

It’s also important to prepare the environment to optimize instruction time. Erin conducts school in a guest room kept clear and simple. The walls are bare except for Eski’s six weekly vocabulary words and a black sheet draped over any clutter. “I try to keep it very clean and serene, but somehow all the Harry Potter Legos end up there!” she laughs.

Erin sits next to her son at a desk with an iPad and keyboard on top.

Crafting the curriculum

Homeschooling is an opportunity to design a learning program that meets your child’s specific needs. While no curriculum will be ideally suited to a student with CVI, homeschool teachers can apply appropriate modifications to ensure access to the material.

Christi, a former educator, made phonemic awareness a primary focus for Drew. “I used Michael Heggerty’s phonemic awareness system,” she says. “It’s actually a curriculum that is developed for the public schools. As a reading teacher, I knew phonemic awareness has to be secure before a child can start thinking about the symbols.”

A few examples of the phonemic awareness activities Christi used with Drew, who is verbal and reads print, include:

Book read-alouds and playing with the sounds in words.
Previewing books and asking questions like “What do you see in this picture?”
Taking pictures of the book’s imagery with an iPad, zooming in, and highlighting the salient features of a target.
Checking on his understanding of the concepts in the book. She remembers an early reader with a picture of a cat curled up in the corner. “That was a big part of the story, but he thought it was a rug. If I didn’t know that, I would have just blown right through it and not known that he didn’t understand it.”
Word bubbling as an anchor. With Drew, “I had to shift my focus from teaching word parts to teaching the whole word and breaking it down into parts.” This is the reverse of what Christi learned to do as a reading teacher. “For example, take the word ‘play.’ He learned the whole word with the word bubbling. But for him to be able to take what he knew, like the ‘a – y,’ and change it to ‘day,’ he couldn’t automatically do that because he didn’t see that word part.”

Erin says she allowed Eski to follow his interests as a younger student. “In the beginning, it was just so hard to keep his attention for long enough to absorb academics. So I set up Lego characters and took pictures of them. We turned them into math, into comic books.” Eski loves Harry Potter and making movies, so “we did a lot of language arts with the stories, movies, and things that he loves. You know, you can do a lot of character analysis about Snape. So that happened pretty naturally.”

Drew is also a fan of Legos and “working with his hands,” says Christi. He likes to follow online video instructions for building Lego kits, then write stories about them using speech-to-text.

Aside from creatively capitalizing on their children’s interests, these two parents consistently ask themselves how the lesson today connects to the real world tomorrow. The Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) can bring academics to life. Christi loves a good hands-on project, so math and cooking (an ECC independent living skill) make the perfect recipe.

“We did a lot of our math with recipes. It did require using adapted cooking skills because Drew couldn’t see the measurements on measuring cups and things like that.” Depth perception was also a challenge. “He would spill stuff a lot because he would miss pouring milk into a cup and it would splatter.” Drawing on past experience learning from Drew’s O&M instructors, Christi remembered to teach him to touch the lip of the cup before pouring.

Erin confides that she finds it difficult to decide which ECC areas should be tackled during the formal school day, especially when she does not have training in many of the requisite skills, like “how to help a kid come up with a motor plan to fasten a zipper.”

She has started to incorporate up to 30 minutes in the morning to practice some of these things. “I had to shift from thinking, ‘Oh, no, we’re spending this half hour figuring out how to put clothes on and not doing reading’ to ‘This is also school.’” She also contracts with an occupational therapist and O&M specialist to help Eski meet certain goals, but admits it can be hard to find the right – or in some cases any – professional to work with your child.

No matter the subject or concept, Christi emphasizes that you can always find an alternative teaching method to suit your child. She remembers an intense research project assigned to Drew. “He was supposed to research one of the state parks and present a Google slideshow on it. Well, trying to get the research off of the websites was hard for him, so I did all of the research for him, put it into a booklet format that he could read, and he had to do the research from that. It was massively time-consuming, but he did it. That was independent learning for him. It was still taking that skill that he needed, but modifying it at a level that he could do.”

Erin finds energy in the creativity homeschooling requires. She says that she starts by identifying the main takeaway of a lesson, then steps back to consider the best way to convey that concept. Then she asks, “How can I minimize everything else that’s part of this lesson? It’s fun to see what works and what doesn’t. If I could go back and do it all again, I would love that. Because, of course, we did a lot of trial and error.”

She explains that it is also helpful to rely on the CVI community of parents, caregivers, and professionals for insights – though not to expect to find a perfect template for your needs. “Everyone’s CVI is so different and at such different levels, with such different challenges,” says Erin. “It’s great to talk to other people who are educating their kids because you can kind of bounce off ideas. But it’s not like you go talk to somebody and get a perfect idea of what you can do.”

Everyone’s CVI is so different and at such different levels, with such different challenges.
Erin Curler, CVI parent and homeschool teacher

Technology and learning tools

Erin estimates that their homeschool program is “98% digital” with iPads as a constant presence. “We have an embarrassing number of iPads in this house. There are lots of times when he has his main iPad for school, and then we’ll have another iPad set up as a second screen, and sometimes another iPad set up as a third screen, and then my iPad for taking my notes. It’s a little nuts.”

Christi also relies heavily on technology. Sometimes she screen mirrors a tablet or laptop on their 55-inch TV, pausing to highlight salient features or make other adaptations on the fly. When the workbook pages from a curriculum are not well adapted, Christi scans and enlarges them on the iPad. Drew asks his Alexa personal assistant how to spell a lot of vocabulary and he often writes with speech-to-text. Low-tech tools like a slant board, dry erase board, and low vision paper with heavier lines are also handy.

Both Erin and Christi are fond of manipulatives. “I like using pennies and dimes a lot because it’s base 10. So yes, they’re learning money, but it’s also perfect for showing that when we transition from nine, you add a penny, then you have 10. Convert the pennies to a dime and convert 10 dimes into a dollar. So we use money for a lot of things.”

Purple, blue and green magnetic blocks for learning math

Digi-Blocks are one of Erin’s favorite teaching tools. Each green manipulative fits into a blue box, which won’t close until all 10 are inside. Ten blue boxes fit into a purple box, and ten purple boxes fit into a larger yellow box. “There are also decimal pieces that can help so much as we’re starting some algebraic concepts.”

AI tools like ChatGPT help Erin streamline the process of making tailored academic exercises. “I can say things like, ‘Hey, give me a passage in the world of Harry Potter that has these six vocabulary words in it. It comes back and it’s never quite right, but it saves me so much mental space.”

She uses AI to generate pictures too. “We read a book called Chains last year, which is about slaves in the Revolutionary War. I would ask AI, ‘Can you generate a picture involving a young woman with these characteristics in this sort of setting? It was never perfect, but it would give him an idea of what that little attic that she slept in might have looked like, which really helped him visualize the setting.”

There are many tech choices out there, and Erin encourages Eski to exercise self-determination in choosing what he likes best. “It’s something I hope he gets a little more involved in. I try really hard to ask ‘Oh, do you like it like this? Does this look better? Does that look better?’”

‘Giving yourself permission’ to teach in new ways

Erin's son gives a thumbs up while sitting at his uncluttered desk with 2 iPads and keyboards.

Homeschooling takes flexible thinking about what learning looks like for your child each day.

Christi says it can be difficult to “give yourself permission to not do school the same way you expect school to look.” Her teaching experience in the public schools led to what she describes as a “rigid sense” of schedule. “We have to teach math in one subject, and we have to teach reading in one subject, and it has to be an hour of each every day, and very structured.” And that wasn’t best for her child. Instead, he benefited from a wide range of hands-on experiences and learning with appropriate materials at an individualized pace.

To shift the outlook, Christi recommends a focus on setting goals and using the school day to inch toward them. “Where do I want both kids to be now? Where do I want to see them in six months, in a year, in five years? It’s having those short-term goals, but long range plans too.”

Drew is a student at a project-based charter school for now, but Christi says she might homeschool her kids again, possibly in a different country, so they can “explore the world, learn to navigate streets and city transportation, go to museums.”

Intentionality is one of Erin’s guiding principles. “I always feel like everything I ask him to do has to matter as much as it can.” She relies on “a lot of explicit instruction, a lot of practice and spiraling ideas so he never goes too long without being reminded of something, connecting everything new with something old that he already knows.” These are the basic learning principles Erin has acquired through careful study of how the brain learns and real-life experience.

Erin says that having control over Eski’s education “feels really good, except for the days when it feels really anxiety provoking!” She predicts that Eski will move back to a traditional school setting at some point and admits this scares her.

As they muse about where their kids will end up next, Erin and Christi demonstrate that they understand nothing is static. As children grow, their needs change. Both moms saw that homeschooling would meet their children’s needs at a certain stage of life and did something about it.

They are glad they took their sons’ education into their own hands, even though it took many hours, creative thinking, and continuous learning. Given the chance, they’d do it all over again.