ASD Son and home schooling

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I swore before I ever had a child that no school was going to try and tell me my child had ADHD just because they didn't want to deal with him. At 7 my son was diagnosed with ADHD. I also swore that I would never have my child home schooled. It was important that they be in public schools so they can understand how the world works and know how to prepare them for life after school. Today, I am seriously considering home schooling because the public school system isn't working for my ASD, ADHD, OCD, anxiety child. I was pretty closed minded and just didn't get it at times, but now I am seriously looking into the home schooling option.

My ASD son has been doing really well academically this year. This last quarter, he had 2 C's, 4 B's and 1 A - which is really awesome for him. I'm really, really proud. However, other issues of the "social" world are really hurting him. He received an In School Suspension about a week ago for asking "inappropriate" questions - like wanting to see someone's belly. Tomorrow his has an Out Of School Suspension and Tuesday and ISS for telling a girl in his class that they were going to get married, have lots of kids, then proceeded to touch her on the belly and then the leg. We've been working with a counselor and practicing what is appropriate and inappropriate questions and touches, etc. etc. What's next if he does it again? Just another suspension day, week, month or never to be allowed back into public school? That's why I need to get him out. Or can they even kick him out of school knowing his disabilities and he does have an IEP?

So, so many questions. My main question though for this post is - who home schools their ASD kiddos and is it working for them? Any advise on what to look at when considering home schooling? Throw everything at me you can - I want to learn as much as I can. I've been looking into it alot and I went to a short 1 hour class on the laws of our state for home schooling.

Thanks to all. I appreciate anything and everything you can help me with.

The suspension/expulsion part depends on state laws. Here in Minnesota, no child with an IEP can be OSS for more than 10 days in any given school year. Even if they do expel him however, they have to offer a comperable placement to satisfy his educational needs according to IDEA whether they want to or not.

My son was home schooled from age 8 - 18. He was ASD, ADHD, OCD, Tourette's, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (now I think that was more related to his "alphabet soup") and had "rage disorder" and gifted.

He went to a public school from K-2 grade. He was always getting in trouble for throat clearing (was not diagnosed with Tourette's yet) and I would have to literally shove him in a teacher's arms and walk off while he was having a tantrum over me leaving (which they encouraged, and it worked)...but otherwise he did ok. (there were other issues but not major)

Second grade, we moved to a new state, new school, and it was a nightmare. The teacher didn't want to work with me, didn't want me in the classroom, and my son said she was very mean. (I believed him.) He also had a lot of sensory issues, kids getting too close, etc. He was not learning a single thing, basically repeating 1st grade all over.

One morning he refused to get on the bus because his shoes were dirty and he forgot to ask me to wash them. (They were caked in mud. ) He said his teacher would punish him for it. She probably would have gotten onto him.

I ended up home schooling him. We didn't have his diagnosis yet, but I instinctively knew this was not a good environment for him. At age 14 (earlier also) he was given the option of going back to public school, but refused.

I also home schooled my daughter from age 5-11. She chose to go back to public school and is thriving there.

If you do home school, here's my #1 recommendation - use a grade-by-grade program. We didn't use it until my son was 14. I lost a lot of money/time trying to combine "unschooling/classical schooling/any way combining "my way" when there was a much easier way. The grade by grade is expensive, but less expensive than trying to do it on your own. We used the Alpha Omega system.

My son is 21 now. His only friends are online. We moved a lot, and he said he quit making friends because soon as he made one we would have to move. However, he does have 400 people subscribed to his YouTube account (where he plays piano), and talks to them.

He worked for two years from age 17-19. He ran his grandma's office supply store, almost full-time. He learned to deal with cranky customers there, and matured a lot. Currently, he's not working or going to school, but we're divorced, he lives with his dad, and his dad his comfortable with that. He does have interests other than the computer, he plays piano (self-taught) and now (I am amazed) reads for pleasure.

My daughter is 18, we held her back a year at the school's suggestion, due to immaturity. She graduates in one year, and is thriving. She has over 10 friends, they call themselves geeks, and are very accepting of her "oddness."

To compare them...my son has greater general knowledge than my daughter, and did get his GED. I would consider him the better educated of the two, perhaps due to his own self-learning. My son has No Problem walking up to a stranger and asking for what he needs (directions, question about something in the store). My daughter has Selective Mutism, and while she's getting better, cannot ask a stranger for help. I consider this a must before she gets in college alone. She plans to go to a local Jr. college first, that will give her time to mature.

We divorced when the kids were 11 and 14. It was very painful, especially because the kids choose to live with their Dad. I was working, he was retired, they had a house, I was living with my parents (and my parents are so strict and old-fashioned that the kids can only tolerate short visits)

Also, it's important to note that their Dad never acknowledged the alphabet soup the kids have. He was very strong on his disapproval and dislike, pure lack of respect for the psychiatrist(s) that diagnosed them. However, he does accomodate them and make allowances for their "differences."

Best wishes. I'm not sure home schooling was the best choice I made, but I feel it was.

We home school all four of our children (3,6,7 and 9). The older three all have ASD's and pretty severe ADD and are all doing much better for no longer being in the school system. Our son is the second oldest and most severe (has Autism diagnosis while the girls have AS) and had a terrible time at school. The teachers always made him 'try harder' and never gave him praise even when he'd got 7/9 in a subject that was ordinarily impossible for him. He barely lasted four months before severely regressing to a pretty much feral way of dealing with the world. At that point we pulled them all out of school and started home schooling (having talked to them about what it meant). It takes a while for them to adjust to not being score/test driven but eventually everything relaxes. We heard that from lots of people and can say the same happened with us. Not to say it's easy, they all frequently take the 'learn when you want' to extremes and want to do nothing but play computer games for ages but then they get back into things fine later.

For maths I can heartily recommend looking up the Math-U-See program. It's a great system made by a guy who seems genuinely nice, knows his stuff and home schooled his kids. Good stuff all round. Apart from that all I can say is focus his work. A broad range of topics sounds great but it just didn't work for us and I totally get why with the strength of special interest focus. So we've basically just worked out what they all seem to want to be when they're older and trimmed down things to just what they need as far as what we suggest they need to be reading up on. As soon as we told our son we were just going to focus on physics and that it would require maths and not much else to begin with he was a LOT keener. And this is a kid who was so destroyed by the system that he wouldn't even read a comic book that mentioned school existing. It might seem like he's over focusing subjects, but half the point is they learn everything in their own way at their own pace, and this focus by us is purely with regards to what we nudge him towards and help him find books on. It's not formal teaching like at school, that never worked for us and was quickly abandoned.

Anyway, probably loads more I could say but no idea what else to pick from the vast list.

I like the idea of focusing on specific interests. This would have worked a lot better for my children.....probably would have saved a lot of power struggles over subjects they didn't like.

My daughter loves animals, I did incorporate as much of it as I could into her learning...but if I had been specific, you need to learn _______
because you will need it for being with animals....it would have saved a lot of frustration.

Also there are years to learn certain subjects. I tried to teach her to tell time when she was 4 or 5 and she said "I don't get it yet, I'll tell you when I'm ready." A year or two later she told me, and she learned quickly.

I enjoyed the last post, made me see maybe I wasn't so wrong to try a different way after all..

I homeschool my 7 1/2 year old son for many of the same reasons that have already been mentioned. I've chronicled much of it, and have a sidebar listing homeschool and asd resources, on my blog. You can check it out if you think it might help www.welcome-to-normal.com

http://www.unschooling.com/library/faq/index.shtml Check this out. It does require open-mindedness, though.

We just started homeschooling our son (11) this year for 5th grade. He started having trouble with kids in the second grade, and began seeing a counselor for help in how to interact with them. He was undiagnosed at that point. By last year, 4th grade, even having been diagnosed, school became hellish for him, between the bullying (real and perceived), stress of potential bullying, difficulties with English, and all of the AS issues our kids face. Plus all the social rules and skills and requirements seem to suddenly jump way up in 4th! We barely made it through the year, and after much prayer, decided to skip private school for homeschooling. It's definitely been a transition!! We use "Switched-On Schoolhouse," from Alpha Omega publishers, because he loves the computer/electronics and that is all on computer. It can, like anything else, get boring, so we add in other things, including audio books, educational computer games, board games, etc. There are national and local homeschooling groups to tap into (google them), as well as Yahoo support groups also. For curriculum, you can start by googling "homeschool curriculum." One of the best pieces of advice that a friend who homeschooled gave me was, don't try to put together a curriculum yourself. And she was absolutely correct, IMHO, at least for now, since I am new and slightly clueless.

There are difficult patches, and frustrating patches, and there is no pat on the back at the end of the day from my kiddo, although I wish there was! But I realize that public school has nothing currently to offer him. He cannot handle the regular school scene, and I count ourselves fortunate that he literally did not have a nervous breakdown last year. I am now able to tailor the day around watching how high his frustration levels are , and switching things around accordingly. I have seen an increase in the amount of pressure that he can handle before he gets to the point where he's storming, and this is a good thing. I no longer have to handle phone calls from the principal and touching base almost daily with his teacher, and he isn't crying every night before bed, and missing school regularly because he doesn't feel well. It has been a life-saver for him, and a learning experience for me. For us, it was definitely the right choice!

God bless you as you make this decision!

I've been homeschooling my two kids for 5 1/2 years. They are in 4th and 5th grade, the 4th grader is the aspie diagnosed this past fall. I recently reached burn-out but I'm doing better now. I just started both of them in Time4learning, an internet curriculum. It frees me up to teach what I want and not what I don't want. I'm very pleased with the quality of Time4learning. We also do Classical Conversations, where both my kids became memory masters last year. We are involved in other groups as well. I wouldn't dream of putting my son in school. Okay, I did dream of it when I was at burn-out but then we found Time4learning. You may still have social issues, depending on what groups you join and how things are handled but you are in control. We have only found wonderful groups but I've heard some terrible fights breaking up some homeschool groups. See, the laws and structure of school is sometimes a good thing. You don't have that with some homeschool groups. My son has done well socially with only a few bumps and bruises along the way.

Math has been the intersting issue fo rmy aspie son. I think the absolute best math curriculum is RightStart but he didn't like the teacher intensity of it. He moved to Teaching Textbooks and then to Time4learning. He liked both but now is extremely frustrated. Advice from this forum says that, for some aspies, they need to be taught math concepts very carefully. Since Teaching Textbooks and Time4learning is taught by computer, I don't know what he was not understanding. He decided that he would like to go back to RightStart where he could understand the concepts better. I hope our relationship is in a better place so that we can do this well.

I hope this helps. Ask any specific questions if you have any.

I just thought of something. I remember your last post about your son getting into trouble about asking to see the other kids stomachs. Is it only girls that he is asking? and could he possibly be interested in pregnancy? As Aspies we have been known to have special interests that seem very odd to other people. It could be that your son is interested in pregnancy, expanding tummies ? Has he every shown interest in pregnant women or talked about it? It was just a thought.

I pulled my son out of school at age 7 once out of desperation. He had early onset Bi Polar disorder and Asperger's but at the time was misdiagnosed as ADHD and ODD. His teacher was horrible. She insisted that we medicate him or she would do nothing for him. We and his psychologist came up with several good ideas that would help him in the class room. Moving him to the front of the room, giving him little daily report cards. I even provided her with the cards and little smiley stamps and stickers. She put him at the back of the class and did not use any of the cards or stickers. She yelled at him all the time and he hated school so much that I had to drag him there kicking and screaming. The last straw was when one of my neighbors called me from a pay phone and told me that she saw my son walking down the highway. We lived down the highway from the school. I had no car and was terrified. I called the school and they told me that they had already got him back. I did not send him to school the next day and I kept him home from then on. My major problem was that I was not prepared to home school as it was a sudden change. It took me some time to get things organized and I ended up having to send him to another school that next year.
I think depending on their reasons (like threats on other childrens lives or sexual type things) they can expel a student regardless of his IEP, however I think they have to provide an alternative school for your child. My son was sent to "reform" type school when he got older which only made him worse. He was in schools with kids in gangs and drug addicts. I believe this is part of the reason he became an addict himself.
Im sorry you are going through all this. I know how difficult it is.

I am so sorry to read this last one.

For very similar reasons I took my son and daughter out of school 3 years ago to home school. My son was totally shutdown in the classroom and I had worked for the previous 3 years with the teaching staff even bringing his therapist into the school to see if that would help them understand better. At the time I though I was dealing with major anxiety issues as he had been diagnosed with PTSD and GAD but he actually has AS as well.

He has never been happier as he was bullied every day as was my daughter who is dyslexic and has other issues. It has taken me 2 years to figure out what impedes his learning and now this year we are adapting the curriculum to help him more and including more of his special interests. There are many different way to achieve the learning outcomes.

I can truely say it has been the best thing I have done. It is not easy and as I am a single parent I cannot work full time and do the school work as well, but I accept that it will not last for ever and one day I will be able to earn more.

I don't know were you are based... US? There is also Switched On SchoolHouse software for all the subjects. I have use some of it this year and Teaching Textbooks for math but may switch to MathUSee next year. You may also have the ability to register through a local online school. I am registered (in Canada) through a school and can do their online courses, have them set up the curriculum for me picking the materials and worksheets etc. but I have chosen to do the picking myself. Look for stores in your area that may specialize in home schooling materials too there are also yearly conferences in some areas where vendors come together and you can do workshops. Lots of Internet based resources and look for a home school group in your area that you can join and get advice from. We have lots here so can do field trips etc.

Good luck with your decision.

Hello, I too am homeschooling my daughter this year. We tried Switched on Schoolhouse but she was very bored with it and didn't want to do it. She knew most of the information they were teaching so we stopped that and just started a unschooling approach it works well for us. She chooses 2 topics on Fridays that she is interested in. During the weekend I prepare lessons based on the topics. I try to cover all the main school subjects through them, language arts, math, science, social studies, history, arts, literature. I have a little log sheet I made up outlining what we did for the week, the resources we used, movies watched, books read, skills learned or practiced, chores done, field trips, and miscellaneous acadamia. I do the log sheet because so many unplanned learning experiences happen during the week and I wanted to document them, for example you're driving down the road and they see a for sale sign on a house. A whole dialogue opens up about the house buying experience, mortages, renting, foreclosure, obtaining bank loans, interest rates, etc. My daughter just learned very valuable lessons in a half hour car ride so I wanted to track those. Secondly I wanted to track the social skills or life training that we have worked on because for her right now that's just as important as the normal educational stuff. So, for example we did a course of study on photography, we studied various photographers, the history of photography, how photography effects social issues, geography and distance, math in the form of money and geographical distance, AND we took field trips everyday so she could take photos of various things (nature, people, architecture, visual interest). Someone else here said this sounds difficult to do, but I don't really find it difficult at all. My daughter works well like this because even when we change subjects it's under the blanket of the topic so she's completely comfortable with it. Sometimes I don't really hit the mark and I have to change gears, like one week she said she wanted to study Adolph Hitler. I spend a long time preparing information about WWII and Jewish concentration camps and had her reading Elie Kazan and Anne Frank and at the end of the week I felt very satisfied and she told me that we still hadn't learned what she wanted to learn. I was dumbfounded and when I asked her she said she only wanted to learn about Adolph Hitler, and mostly how he got so many people to follow his "dumb ideas". LOL, so sometimes it's hard not to try and broaden her focus for her, but I try to really let her be the guide. Good luck to you, I hope you gather information from everyone and this works for you. I did find that since I started homeschooling I did get MY daughter back and don't see the hateful, mean, and angry girl I was stuck with for the last two years.

[/quote] I remember your last post about your son getting into trouble about asking to see the other kids stomachs. Is it only girls that he is asking? and could he possibly be interested in pregnancy?

liloleme: OMG - I just remembered something. One night my son was playing on the computer - he was practicing typing and he found in Microsoft Word or somewhere (he wasn't on the internet) where you can download a picture or clip art and he found pictures of pregnant women and he printed a bunch of them out. He had hid them in a notebook but I found them. I mean they were clothed women, but they were showing their bellies. I had totally forgot all about that until you mentioned it. That could definitely be a big part of his facination with bellies. Thank you for throwing that out there.

Also, thank you SO SO MUCH to everyone who responded to this post. I have taken all the info given and will be doing a lot of research.

Thanks to all and have a great day.

So he'll be an obstetrician, and gets kicked out of school for it Typical.