Daily necessary activities such as Eating, Dressing, Grooming, Toileting and Bathing are a major challenge for most special needs children. Depending of the severity of issues, children are skilled in some or all of these to varying degrees. These are usually on top of parent's list of concerns and require expensive full-time assistance or supervision. Competence in these activities are necessary towards achieving independence.

Based on experience with numerous children, we find most children are able to learn these over time. The underlying challenges are usually poor communication skills, poor motor development, cognitive development or simply slow learning.

Based on specific and detailed assessment of a child's capabilities and challenges, we employ interventional strategies for step-wise and gradual learning through intensive and repetitive training across all these activities of daily living in a healthy and hygienic manner.

Human being is a social animal. He loves to be a part of community and shares the joys, sorrows and responsibilities among the society members. Most children with special needs struggle with societal norms and are poor in interpersonal relationship development and interaction with family & friends. We need to train them in order to develop relationship with others. They also learn how to behave in different settings and in front of different members.

Through socialization, they learn to be friends with others, follow group rules on different occasions, seek help from others and help others. Training in the area of socialization helps them to be a well behaved child in the family, school and community.

Academic achievement for special needs children is of great importance for them to achieve some semblance of normalcy. Parents expect them to continually improve in academics. Some children lag behind their siblings and peers in academics. Some students face subject-specific or unique challenges leading to overall lower achievement in academics. These students sometimes feel frustrated, embarrassed or low on confidence.

At Learning Ladder, we work with the child on Academic Remediation in subject-specific areas in order to make them independent in the class. Targeted intervention strategies helps the child to improve learning in the classroom and boosts their confidence.

Targeted interventions include:

• Improving Hindi for who Hindi is not a native language
• Improving grade-level reading/writing
• Improving comprehension
• Answering questions and writing answers
• Dyslexia - inability to read properly
• Dysgraphia - inability to write properly

Functional Academics focuses on skills that are useful and necessary in a student’s life or the future. It is another way to describe basic literacy skills such as reading selected sight words, filling personal data form, mobile number, basic medicines or first aid, counting of money, reading time on a clock.

Functional Academics is the key to develop self-confidence and increase functionality among children with special needs. They have limitations in following regular academics so they can be trained through functional academics to apply the concepts in day to day living. It provides them the opportunity to perform day to day operations such as shopping, reading directions, ordering food in a restaurant, sending voice messages to family and friends, sending message to family and friends.

Functional Academics is a package of activities like -

• Reading own name
• Details of family members
• Simple phonetic words
• Phrases and small sentences
• Reading and following of complete instructions
• Basic money transactions
• Simple calculations
• Operation of a mobile phone

Concept of money and judging value for the money is a very important skill in modern life. We can get almost everything if we have the money and know how to use it properly. It is a complex topic and requires competency to function independently in the larger society. For children with special needs, we focus on simple aspects of understanding money and shopping. During the training of shopping and money management program, they learn identification of money, organization of money, counting of money, money transaction and shopping at different levels.

Instead of being left home, it allows a child to participate in this common social activity, allows them to step outside of their home into larger society. It enables a child to feel independent and competent to fulfill their needs and desires to some extent, even if performed under supervision.

Simple cooking skills not only can be an enjoyable and fulfilling activity, they also help a child feel a sense of accomplishment. Cleaning and pantry care are also essential skills so they can participate in these daily activities. Some competency in these can also prepare them for independent living if they are otherwise capable of doing so. Regardless of eventual goals, these are useful and fun activities that every child can engage in and benefit from.

At Learning Ladder, we have a full program to teach basic cooking skills such as cooking rice, potatoes, eggs, daal, etc. We teach them use of variety of gadgets such as blenders (mixie), pressure cookers, rice cookers, and ovens. Children also learn making tea using tea bags, juices using powdered mix, or fruit juices using blenders. We also continually look for specialized and safe gadgets such as peelers, graters, orange peelers, etc which our children can safely use.

As a fun activity, we sometimes plan a lunch party where children cook lunch meals all by themselves (of course with supervision and some assistance) and serve to their teachers and fellow students. We also prepare menus so children can take orders and bring appropriate servings.

Working in the kitchen requires great attention to safety as some utensils are sharp and there is fire danger. We take safety very seriously and work with children with careful supervision to avoid any mishaps. Also we have arrangements at hand for any fire prevention such as fire extinguisher, bucket of sand, etc., and our staff are trained in fire prevention. We also teach children basic first aid in case of any cuts or bruises.

Modern world is highly dependent on computer, mobile and other related gadgets in day-to-day life affairs. Every person is using mobile and other devices for accessing social media, online shopping, connecting with family and friends, entertainment and browsing for variety of information. Children with special needs also need to learn how to use these gadgets. They can also communicate about the problems or any incident away from home to the family and friends. Learning Ladder provides them an opportunity to get trained on such devices and to be efficient in modern technology which is required in day-to-day life.

All children belong to their respective society where they stay and spend most of their time. In case of children with special needs, they have limitations in socialization, communication, following societal norms, understanding and exhibiting desired behaviors unlike their sibling and peer group. Community living is a part of training at Learning Ladder where they learn how to behave and perform various activities in different community settings. They learn shopping at mall, posting a letter at post office, watching a movie in a theatre, ordering and eating in a restaurant and playing in a park while maintaining all societal norms and without disturbing others.

We have aspirations for our children to be productively and meaningfully engaged in life. Depending on their abilities, our children might work in some profession, or a job, or participate in some business activity in a suitable environment. Regardless of the challenges involved, we must aspire to prepare our children for such possibilities. While we can train our special children for specific vocational or job role, there are many prerequisite skills that they need to master before they can function among colleagues or in a larger society. These prerequisites come under so called Prevocational Training.

While our children's peer group and siblings learn naturally through observation and incidental learning, our children with special needs require dedicated and specialized training in several areas. As these children enter their teen years, and prepare for a transition out of schooling, it becomes important to prepare them for real world.

At Learning Ladder, we work with children in identifying the areas of need and then on training them in such skills. We train the children by devising a variety of assignments, involving them in specific tasks and responsibilities done around the center, and devising strategies and employing techniques where learning challenges appear.

In consultation with parents, we also devise new programmes for any other skill identified as per the specifics of a child or a targeted job role such as in a parent's shop or office.

As our special needs children grow up beyond teenage years, it becomes necessary to engage them in some sort of regular vocational engagement not only to make them feel productive and a sense of independence, but also possibly earn a living. This is a huge challenge facing parents and children and we have to strive towards preparing our children for such roles in the larger society. While many may not need to or may not be able to manage all the logistics of going to work and performing satisfactorily, we nonetheless must try our best to prepare them for such a possibility.

At Learning Ladder, we fully appreciate this challenge and the need of vocational training and prepare our children with carefully selected skills working in consultation with the parents. Vocational training module is precise and individual in nature, provides the specific skills set training which is directly related to potential job and agreed upon by parents.

We are equipped to teach limited but targeted, specialized vocational skills that prepare our children to perform specific well-defined roles. We feel it is too ambitious to expect most children to work a "normal" job, but our experience is that children can perform well-defined roles in a friendly and accommodating environment such as parents' shop, business or office. We also brainstorm with parents about possibilities and prepare a specialized individual training program including working with equipment such as a specific photocopier, specific software, etc.

We teach some general vocation-type skills to all grown up children that are useful in various settings:

Learning Ladder believes strongly in the power of hobbies. Hobbies enrich a person's lives. Hobbies provide the energy to rejuvenate, recreate and refresh one self. Pursuit of hobbies is known to be very therapeutic and is almost like meditation in its positive effects as one gets engrossed in the activity and forgets for some time all the pain, suffering, or negativity in life. Further, it is a great way to express creativity, keep oneself engaged meaningfully, a good way of recreation, and gives a break from daily routine. People in our society have been known to take great interest in traditional hobbies such as knitting, embroidery, sewing and mending, gardening, taking walks in the park, playing street badminton, playing cards, cooking tasty special dishes, fixing things around the house, etc.

It is difficult to predict what a person will like or dislike by way of hobbies and the best way is to allow them to pick based on exposure. Some take a fondness towards embroidery, while others develop great love for certain board games, painting, or sports. Exposure is also a great way of discovering innate talent - it is difficult for a parent to know what talents lie hidden in our child unless they get an opportunity to come out!

We offer children exposure to variety of potential hobbies by engaging with them in different play-based activities and let them explore. We work with children in:

• Arts and crafts
• Drawing, sketching and painting
• Puzzles
• Dance
• Singing
• Gardening
• Cooking
• Embroidery
• Computers and video games
• Board games
• Pottery
• Playing musical instruments
• Limited sports such as cricket or ball play
• In regular outdoor visits to parks: cricket, football, frisbee, badminton, ball throwing and catching