Starting with Autistic DD

Do you live in a state that must approve your curriculum choices?  We don’t; we just had to let the school system know what materials we were using each year, but after that, they did not ask whether we actually used them or went with something else.

If you have been using ABC Mouse and have seen results with it, I would not worry about what the state thinks about it. It doesn’t hurt to see what the schools are using in terms of curriculum and teaching materials, though, because you might run across something worthwhile that you haven’t seen before.

I homeschooled my autistic son until he was in 7th grade then put him in school.  There were a lot of factors involved in this decision, but he has done well academically and with life skills.  He is 17 now.

Creating and sticking to routines proved to be very important with him. Transistions also took a lot of work. I would say that I wish I had worked more on habits of attention and obedience much earlier and more consistently with him. Autistic kids are wired differently, so things often take a lot longer to sink in, but it is possible to see the meltdowns level out in time.

Reading was very hard and took a long time with my son as well.  One thing I worked on early was developing a love for reading.  I read to all of the kids during lunch and before bed virtually every day.  I asked them every time what they liked best or remembered the most about the day’s reading and developed their oral narration skills that way. My son continued asking for me to read to him before bed even when he was 12 and 13 years old.  Once he could read simple books (such as Go, Dogs, Go), I would have him read out loud, which helped a lot.

As far as teaching early reading skills, we used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons with the girls, but this didn’t sit well with him.  We used a number of online programs and big cards with letters and words on them to teach ds to read.  It was a slow process.  It’s been so long that I don’t really remember which programs we used, but I think we used Starfall for awhile. We read a lot of easy readers together, such as Find Nat and The Tan Can by Kelli Foster, lots of Dr. Suess rhyming books, book series by James Marshall and Else H. Minarik, and so on.

You might also want to take a look at SCM’s Delightful Reading.  What helped us was making that actual work he did very short, maybe 5 minutes at a time scheduled at specific times (“Right after breakfast you’ll do your reading lesson, and then we’ll read from our story book while you play with your Duplo blocks…”) and the read aloud was only a 10-minute session unless all of the kids seemed to want to go on.  Even then, we usually went with just finishing one more page or one more minute, so we could maintain the habit and routine.

Don’t be surprised at the emotional level of the older child matching the younger one at this time.  We were told at one point that the emotional age of autistic kids is anywhere from slightly below biological age to 75% of their biological age.  When my son was 12, it did seem as though he “acted” more like a 9-year old.  This gap has narrowed significantly in the past year or so, but he is still not quite a typical 17-year old, which is good for him since he’s only in 10th grade in school.  He has gone from just preferring to hang out with younger boys to being almost a mentor to the 11- and 12-year olds in our youth group and Sunday children’s classes.

Most of all, I would say for the next few years, don’t lament where you wish your child was with reading and math, but celebrate the small successes, which are really big things for a learning-challenged child. We had an intervention specialist early on tell us they thought my son might not ever learn to read.  I kind of wondered for awhile when he would dutifully sound out “m-a-t” and then say “map” or “pat” or something else.  One day, we were in a doctor’s waiting room and he just started reading P.D. Eastman’s book Go, Dogs, Go out loud all by himself.  It was a okay-who-taught-you-to-read moment.

We had a moment like that with counting–he couldn’t count past nineteen and would combine 13 and 14 into one word (“fir-teen”) as he counted.   Then, when I was doing something else and told him to line up all of the matchbox cars he could find and count out loud, I distinctly heard 13 and 14, and he counted all the way to 34 or something like that.  I walked into the room and asked why he stopped, and he said, “Cuz I ran out of cars!”  We cheered and celebrated.  (In a subdued manner, of course, because loud clapping and cheering scared him at the time….we learned to adapt to his needs and emotions over time as a family.)

Hopefully, other parents who are currently using early reading materials will chime in here, whether they are teaching NT children or those with learning challenges.

Another thing I thought of that you could use your RV-ing to your advantage is that autistic kids often have trouble seeing that the same rule applies in different situations or locations.  For example, you might have the rule “we don’t run into the street” down pat at your house only to find that it doesn’t occur to your child that “we don’t run into the street” at Grandma’s house, simply because she has a memorized picture in her mind where the “street” you don’t run into looks only like the street out in front of your house.

You can reinforce various rules each time you pull into a new campground.  Focus on a couple of rules you want to teach/reinforce, and go through them, practice observing them, etc. when you get to a new place. It will be a good way for her to learn that many rules do not change just because you are somewhere else.