istockphoto.com/imagez
Many parents of children on the autism spectrum are unable to find a successful place for them in the school system. Often, teachers and staff have little or no training in autism and treat our children’s symptoms as disciplinary problems rather than manifestations of sensory overload and anxiety. We may grow tired of being afraid when the phone rings, signaling yet another crisis at school. Perhaps we are plagued by that uneasy feeling that our child is falling through the cracks and not receiving the help they so desperately need. Maybe we feel that home is just a better environment for them than school.
Some parents opt for homeschooling, while others are driven to it. However, when taking on homeschooling a child with autism, it can be a daunting prospect.
Gratefully, a new website exists to provide guidance for parents homeschooling their child with autism. Autistic Homeschooling contains an abundance of information on topics including philosophies of homeschooling, homeschooling by
states and of course, a trove of potential curriculum.
Additionally, Khan Academy has a huge collection of
entertaining and informative videos on a myriad of topics and test preparation for standardized exams, all free of charge. Many universities are marketing online learning. For instance, Brigham Young University (BYU) has middle school through college classes online for credit as well as free courses. See if your school system partners with free online academies for homeschooling if you wish to remain within the system while keeping your child at home.
I have to homeschool my son through his remaining three years of high school with no help. The Seattle school system has a Homeschool Resource Center that is top-notch, but my son is considered too severely impaired to access the program. The catch-22 is that they have no appropriate placement for him in the classroom and no resources for him outside of it.
My strategy is to set credits aside and prepare him to pass the GED. Taking his area of interests and fashioning an independent study encompassing a variety of subjects from different standpoints is the most viable option I have of keeping him on track. I am also recruiting mentors from the academic community to challenge and inspire him.
Every child is different and every path is unique. It’s heartening that more guidance and resources are now being made available to parents as we make these critical decisions about our children’s education and future.
I’ve home schooled all but one of my kids with special needs. For my two oldest children I went through North Atlantic Region Schools. They both received High School Diplomas, not “Letter of Completion” like the public school wanted to give them. My middle child’s behaviors got in the way of me home schooling the other so; I placed him in the public school system. After, 13 years of asking for help with him. His doctor just changed his diagnosis from bipolar to Asperger Syndrome..Autism. Now, everything makes complete since. I figure if he’s going to get through high school I’m going to have to home schooling this guy MIT needs this kid.
I have been homeschooling for 17 yrs and have at least 6 more to go. My oldest 3 are graduated and gone. I still have 2 at home and each have some special needs. My youngest has ADHD/Bi-Polar/PDD-NOS. I started using the Charlotte Mason approach with them and love it. Lapbooking, unit studies, Queen Homeschooling Lang, Math-U-See are working really well. The hardest time I had was teaching the youngest to read. I finally got “You Can Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Lessons”. It worked and he is reading almost to grade level.
There are still challenges, and meltdowns but they are far and few between.
It’s good to hear of your successes! And B., I’m happy for you that you have the correct diagnosis now. That’s huge!
SM
Good to know that this alternative is available. Wondering how you get the socialization piece in. Do you mix at all with other, more traditional home schoolers?
I live In Burnaby, BC, Canada. My son just completed grade 4. we began homeschooling mid way thru grade 2. We are very lucky to have an option here called distributed learning. Essentially, we are homeschoolers, in charge of our education, but we have a center we are a part of. We have a learning consultant/teacher we can consult anytime. We can access their resource library. Best of all, they have classes we can choose to attend, and field trips/social events we can sign up and participate in. It is so ideal for us. My son struggled in public school, he’s smart but doesn’t sit down for long which disrupts others. It was killing his self esteem to be removed all the time, and he was making no friends. Lunch time his aide would basically say “go play” so he’d wander around the other kids, with no help on joining them.
Now, because we only attend, when he’s able to participate, he’s accepted by other children, we have more playdates/social times then we ever had before. We keep learning time at home, seperate, from social time when we’re out. Less pressure for him, seperating the two.
I know not all are able to have their child home with them all the time, and I’m thankful every day that I have a home business and was able to choose this life for us.
thank you for the resources you’ve listed, I will look at them for sure. I’m more than happy to discuss homeschooling/ASD & and our awesome kids anytime..be in touch if you’d like.
I have a child that is Autistic, MMR, I pulled him out of school last year and we did our first year of homeschooling. The issue I have is that when I pulled him out he was already 3 years behind. In public school they told me that he could not really progress much more due to his MMR. Does anyone have any information or websites that can be useful for the Autistic child that is not at grade level but needs to catch up to the best of their ability.
To Suzanne –
off the top of my head…Successmaker is amazing. It’s a math program you sign up for. your child does an initial assessment (which is fun for them) then the program starts you off at the base/the foundation of where your math skills are, and builds from there. if a child seems to falling in a certain skill.. the prgram resets/reprograms itself to go back and present the foundation concepts for each level of math again. It’s quite amazing, the complete opposite of how teachers do it.. lol. we bought it with our education allotment thru our DL center. $90 a year I think?
Suzanne,
Just start where you are. Don’t worry about what the school says. He may never catch up to his peers but he will do the best he can. The programs I listed are very good and not expensive at all. I love that the work moves quickly. My son gets frustrated after a few minutes working on a skill. So I give him short and to the point lessons. He’s ok with that and gets them done without too much trouble.
Susan Ford Keller,
My children are around other children their age at church, 4-H and playing w/the neighborhood children. They are also exposed to the elderly on a regular bases as my Mom lives with us part time. They’re exposed to younger children everyday with their niece and nephews whom they adore. They do not lack in socialization on any level. My son w/PDD sometimes gets overwhelmed. I let him have his space, and he goes to his room, or outside to play.
At one point I had an arrangement with my son’s school that he would receive speech, OT, and social skills at school and academics at home.
SM
Thank you everyone for your help. I really appreciate learning about all these resources and alternatives.
Leah and Kimberly H. Thank you so very much for your encouragement and resources I will be doing my homework and looking into what would work best for my son. It’s great to know that we can work together as a community to help eachother.
We are doing k12.com this year. It’s an online public school. My son will still get 1 on 1 with me at home and he’ll have a teacher as well as a special ed teacher (he has autism) and they send you everything you need for the whole year and it’s mastery based and FREE. For me, it’s a in-between homeschooling and the public school. Some of the work is done online and some offline and the kids gets to have real classes online with their teacher. This is our first year and we’re so excited!
Sounds good. Let us know what you think after you’ve done it a while…SM
They have a facebook page where you can see how others like it too. Just type in k12. So far we are enjoying it. Cant wait to go on our first field trip.
Sounds like a great solution! I’m happy for you.
We withdrew our kids from school last January and went with k-12.com. I could have never known the impact it would have on Charlie, our 11 year old who has autism. We found out that the teachers were asking Charlie if he knew this word or that word and he would say “YES!” Well, he was just mimicking the other kids. I have taken him back to second grade vocab and we are also allowed to do second grade math, history, etc. All of those subjects, science as well, are all based upon being fluent in English. They would have worked with more diligence for a child with ESL, but in Charlie’s case, they just skipped him ahead. I am confident that we can get him advanced. K-12 let us work his lessons all summer long. Love that school!
That is awesome Jan! I love that my son can start where he is and maybe one day catch up to where he should be.
We withdrew our oldest (Asperger) from school midway through this year. Living in Oz we are fortunate to be able to enrol in the School of Distance Education which provides all the materials required in a prescriptive format, that is easy to understand and implement. My son is now so much happier, his self-esteem and self-belief have skyrocketed and he can now see that he is capable of doing this work, it just needs to be done in a different way.
On a side note, for those whose children are “behind”, I just wanted to let you know that they will catch up. My son is living proof – he went from a D in maths to an A. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication and persistence on the “teacher’s” (be that you or the school teacher) part, but these kids are not dumb, they just need to shown how to do things in a way that makes sense to them.
Good Luck.
Too bad k12.com did not have HS course in my county, they have some in other counties in the state. My guy was for years dx’d w OCD finally got a dx of Aspie in March- he has 3 years of HS left. School kept putting him w/ emotional disabled students.We will most likely go the GED route to get him off this crazy decipline train. They never used the tools they had to help him. Those who know him know he’s great and respectful. He gets in trouble when he listens to others tell him to do stuff and he does it because he thinks they are his friends.
Sounds like another version of my son’s story. He’s an Aspie w/OCD and they put him in with the profoundly retarded. GED is our game plan too.
Good luck to you Susan. Are you in the UK or US?
Thanks so much. I am in Seattle.