Homeschooling With Level 1 Autism

 Homeschool has been something I have done since my oldest was in preschool, she was really smart and bored and it became obvious that homeschool was the best option for her.

So when my 2nd child was right behind her in school, followed by 2 more a couple of years behind the first two it was natural to just teach them together.

I did not know any of my kids would be neuro diverse, let alone all of them. 

Homeschooling a child who does not fit the mold, takes lots of trial and error.  

My child with autism has caused much of a learning curve. She is academically on grade level or above for the most part. She taught herself to read, history and science have always been an interest (especially Egyptian history).  Her only deficits are in math and writing. 

Math I think was caused by a teacher in 3rd grade, she attended a 2 day a week school homeschooling the rest of the week, apparently the teacher and students made fun of her when she got things wrong. I don’t know what happened in that class room, but I know my child lost her confidence in her ability to do school.  It took years of not grading and not telling her when she was wrong to boost her confidence. Then slowly teach her to accept criticism. It was frustrating, and I worried we would never get out of that slump, but with time, patience and lots of work we did. 

Writing is hard because as much as she loves it she will not slow down so physically it is messy, she can not spell to save her life and refuses to write in anything other than first person. This means teaching her to write academic papers has been a chore and not something she is successful at. She took writing classes with our homeschool charter and still could not get it, so it is not just poor teaching on my part. She is very stubborn and does not see the point. We will be working on that this year.

Next year we will be studying algebra 1 and personal finance, yes she will be in 10th grade but she is doing well and will still be able to graduate on time as long as I keep her confidence up and we get her through the math and understanding it. She will focus heavily on writing papers of different kinds next year and we will be doing a mix of on her own and step by step with me. Since it is something her younger siblings really need to work on we will include them at the same time and hopefully they will become good at papers. She will also work on recognizing spelling mistakes and using tech to help with her writing.

Homeschooling an autistic child is not always as easy as what I have. Many times it is harder. My autistic child is not the child I struggle most with when it comes to homeschooling. She wants to homeschool. She loves being home and can not wait for our farm, though she doesn’t want to move.

We will talk about one of those difficult children another time.