Children and Young People with Down syndrome at School

From province to province across Canada, provisions and systems for the education of children with Down syndrome in pre-school, elementary school and secondary school are wildly different. Each province also features different post-secondary educational opportunities for students with Down syndrome. It is impossible, then, to give blanket guidance on how to navigate these systems, which have different requirements and expectations.  

In this section, however, we will

At every level of education, the students who demonstrate

are virtually guaranteed to be successful in school. Many children and young people with Down syndrome love their teachers, classmates and school and they are popular members of the school community. When they arrive at school prepared for the changes and challenges involved, their chances of enjoying school and having positive learning experiences are increased. Sometimes, though, because of inadequate preparation, students with Down syndrome can require extra supports that strain the school’s capacity. By following the suggestions given below, parents and guardians can set their child up for success and ensure that each level of education is a great experience for all involved.

One of the most powerful correlations in this field is between Down syndrome and reduced language capacity. Many people with Down syndrome deal with one or all of the following language challenges:

These factors also relate to the ability of people with Down syndrome to narrate stories, where they experience marked challenges.

In schools, teachers are not accustomed to supporting a student’s language learning while they are teaching curriculum concepts, but this is central to the learning of a person with Down syndrome. Students with Down syndrome might not embark on the First Nations and Settlers unit, for example, already knowing what a “log cabin” is, or what “ploughing” means, or understanding a sentence like, “They trapped animals for their skins”, and this affects their learning.

To begin to address the language learning needs of students with Down syndrome, teachers should consult Speech and Language Pathologists, who can demonstrate some helpful techniques and approaches. This is an easy recommendation to make, but not always feasible, as S-LPs are not readily available in many school districts, and they are not always tasked with supporting teachers in their whole-class teaching efforts.

But children and young people with Down syndrome also benefit from personalized work with a S-LP, and the bad news is that the capacity of the educational system to provide the intensity and variety of speech and language therapy options that are required to optimize the communicative ability of most young people with Down syndrome, is well below what is needed. Speech therapy can be very powerful, especially in the preschool and elementary school years, but it can also be helpful and effective in secondary school as well, where it is usually not even a consideration. Teachers and parents face a difficult reality:  students with Down syndrome would benefit from support with their language skills, but this support is difficult to obtain. Watch this space for advice on how even non-experts can offer language help to people with Down syndrome.

For students with Down syndrome, the challenge of mastering reading breaks down into at least two distinct processes: learning to read and understanding what is read.

Learning to Read
The preeminent authority on teaching reading to children with Down syndrome is Dr. Patricia Oelwein. [1] She laid out a comprehensive plan for teaching reading that prompts students with Down syndrome, who have strong visual skills, to recognize whole words.  At first these words are selected because they are personally significant (family members’ names, for example), and they are matched with pictures, but as the student becomes more adept, word families (can, man, fan) are covered, and then the student is introduced to a broader range of words and texts.  According to Oelwein’s approach, which was developed in the 90s, the key strategy the child uses when they encounter an unknown word, is to look at its appearance and see if it is close to another word they recognize and go from there.   Many thousands of students with Down syndrome learned to read using this approach, and it is supported by the research which claims that young students with Down syndrome display relative strengths in word recognition. [2] 

After Oelwein, researchers investigated the possibility that phonemic awareness and phonics could also be helpful for some students with Down syndrome, who wanted to be able to decode or sound out unknown words.  The results were clear: students with Down syndrome have a baseline of weaker phonemic skills than their typically developing peers, but these can also contribute to their reading success.  Strangely, it also emerged in this research that rhyme detection is unusually difficult for young readers with Down syndrome. [3] Phonemic awareness and ability to rhyme are seen as necessary prerequisites by many teachers, who often assess a student’s readiness to learn to read by their knowledge of sounds and rhyme.  We now know that students with Down syndrome who may not have strong phonemic awareness and rhyming can still get on with the challenge of learning to read, using a word recognition approach, and they can do very well.

Reading comprehension (Understanding what is read) 
While the experiences of children with Down syndrome learning to read are very positive, the evidence of their reading comprehension is not as encouraging. In fact, reading skills and reading comprehension skills have separate developmental paths for people with Down syndrome. Unlike many of their typically developing peers, whose comprehension of what they read grows as their ability to decode and recognize words also improves, for readers with Down syndrome, their word-level skills can grow without any associated rise in their understanding of what they read. This indicates that teachers and reading tutors will have to make special efforts to develop the comprehension skills of their students with Down syndrome. [4]

Everyday Math
Teachers and parents of people with Down syndrome often emphasize the importance of teaching reading and downplay the contribution of mathematics to achieving a good life.  From the earliest years, Dr. Deanna Horstmeier writes [5], children with Down syndrome often lack the formative experiences that would develop their familiarity with Math concepts: their parents may not invite them to “Pick out four nice red apples” at the grocery store, they don’t encourage them to find the door to the dentist’s office by telling them it’s the “third one in this hallway”, and they may do their banking for them, so the young person never becomes aware of the difference between a “deposit” and a “withdrawal”. Horstmeier contends that the cumulative effect of this lack of numeracy experiences is significant: as they work to become more independent, people with Down syndrome are constrained by their weak grounding in everyday Math concepts.

Teaching Math
Teachers are comfortable with, and experts at, teaching conventional Math topics such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and ratios, but without hands-on methods of exploring, learning and applying these concepts in the lives of people with Down syndrome, Math lessons may just be rote performances. In addition, it should be noted that knowing how to weigh things, or measure, or use a die to play a board game can be as significant in most people’s lives as addition with regrouping. A balance of practical and more abstract Math topics may be just right for students with Down syndrome.