issuses in school....

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Homework is horrible at our house. My son, only in 1st grade gets so angry the minute we try to do his math homelinks book or read together. He gets so angry that he shouts, swears, screams, hits,kicks, pushes, says he wished I was dead and then says he wishes he was dead.

My husband will come upstairs and ask "What are you doing to him?" I'll simply answer "Homework time."

I've told his teacher and school counselor and they said to stop trying and now they are giving him extra help in school. Trying to keep home time comfortable for him and back off of homework. Some of it for us seems to be that he's white knuckling it through school so hard that when he comes home he just want's to rest.

So far, what we can tell with my son, it's not that he can't figure out the academic part, he just doesn't understand the directions and gets so frustrated trying to figure out what they want him to do that he doesn't even get to the actual academic part of it, if that makes sense.

We live in the U.S., in Texas, and at one point, I had "following written directions" put into my son's IEP (individual education plan). The school did not really teach this to my son effectively, but I would request that they try to work with him on following directions.

My older son with high functioning classic autism never read directions back when he was in kindergarten. He would just start trying to do the worksheet, and he was able to do it if the worksheet could be figured out very easily or if the worksheet was set up the same way as others he had done before. Sometimes, he would do an entire sheet of problems incorrectly because he was doing the worksheet the same way that he had done similar worksheets with slightly different directions.

A couple of things that I found helpful for my son were the following:

1) Use videos, DVDs, picture books, and computer programs to work on concepts at home. I found that using these materials greatly reduced my son's math stress and helped him develop a positive attitude towards math and towards completing math assignments. He now says that he wants to teach math when he grows up.

Some of these types of materials are free on the net or through public or school libraries. Your school district may even have a central library that parents can borrow materials from; see my free website, www.freevideosforautistickids.com for a lot of links to materials that are free, offer free trials, or are reasonably priced.

2) Look for a good workbook that you can use for teaching directions. With my older son, I actually got a well-written and well-illustrated math workbook from the bookstore and filled in the answers with magic marker. I then read the workbook to him like it was a book, showing how I had used directions to complete it. (Much faster and less stressful than making him do all the problems in the workbook, and he just needed to see how to do the problems, not actually do them all).

Abstraction skills... always a tough one. Also one that you will have to work through if you want your son to remain in main stream classes as long as possible. Teachers cannot change their cirriculum for each and every students needs. (not my opinion, just a consensus reached in many IEP battles) With my daughter, we talk through the problems without the book. I find the core question being asked - the concrete part of it - and start there. Let her give me the factual answer first and then ease her into the opinion part. It takes alot of back and forth but, you can get there. Just keep at it and always remember patience is of the utmost virtue!

He was spending hours n homework...literally. If was awful but since then We have changed his meds and he barely has homework now, His attitude is amazing now and he is always so much happier. But he does still struggle with those questions that have "gray" answers