Starting with Autistic DD

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  • MPoli
    Participant

    Hello! I am so excited to have discovered SCM and am ready to jump in. I attempted to homeschool my 8yo DD two years ago and it was a disaster. She shuts down after 2-3 minutes or completely melts down, which makes doing just about anything difficult. She is moving into 3rd grade in public school yet reads around a K level. She and her 3yo NT sister are pretty much on the same level in terms of emotional development. I don’t know where to start in regards to reading and writing with her. Math is a better subject for her (yay, manipulatives!), and we plan on mostly unschooling for science and social studies, as we’ll be traveling in our RV most of the time. Does anyone have any experience or advice in this area? We’ve been helping her stay up to speed with ABC Mouse over the summer, but the state doesn’t consider that a legitimate learning tool (even though she’s better engaged with that than anything else we’ve tried, and it seems to be helping more than her IEP accommodations ever did). Thank you so much for any help you can give!

    2Corin57
    Participant

    Hi 🙂 Fellow ASD-mom here. My daughter is 6 with ASD (high functioning). She too, is delayed emotionally, though she’s only about 2 years delayed, so she’s functioning emotionally on a 4 year old level.

    So, my questions are:

    – Where is she at with handwriting? Because this would vary what my suggestions might be for that.

    – For reading, most children on the spectrum do best with visual/tactile methods, so I would suggest All About Reading. The lessons can be kept short, they include hands on manipulatives and really give them that visual reinforcement. Spectrum children tend to be good visual memorizers and are very rules-based, which again, AAR meets this need.

    – Keep a routine/schedule every day as much as possible. All children thrive with routine, but for ASD children it is a need. Since you’re traveling in an RV, there is a lot of chaos for her to deal with, so keep your day to day routine the same as much as possible: maintain the same meal times and bedtimes especially. If you can’t do lessons at the same time (ideally in the morning), then at least follow the same schedule for the subjects (Reading, Handwriting, Math etc…). Give her a visual schedule so she can SEE what she has to do. Allow her to check it off when it’s done – not only does this give her a sense of accomplisment, but a sense of control that spectrum kids need.  Something along the lines of this:

    http://www.schkidules.com/combo-board/#jp-carousel-3411

    I would not let her use video-based learning on a regular basis, but instead use it as a motivator. Use an incentive chart like this. For each task she completes (be it finishes a subject, reads 2 pages, completes 10 math problems etc…) she gets a star. When she fills her chart she gets a reward.

    Or, you could use a time based method. Since she is emotionally/developmentally about 3-4 years old, you have to respect that her attention span is next to 0. So non-preferred lessons are going to need to be kept short, you may need to do them in a couple sessions per day. I would so no more than 5-10 minutes. Use a visual timer so that she can see how much time she has left. Hourglass timers like these would work well:

    A set from 30 seconds to 10 minutes
    A 15 minute timer

    And again, you could use the incentive chart – for every 5 or 10 minutes she completes she earns a star. After a set number of minutes (30, 60 etc…), she gets her reward.

    The big thing to remember with Autism is that the NEED visual reinforcements, always always always. They just can’t process things the same way we can, so they need simple visual reinforcement: visual schedules of your lessons, or your day, visual reinforcements for time, for tasks, rewards etc… And your lessons themselves will need to be very visual.

     

    Sue
    Participant

    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.

    Sue
    Participant

    While 2Corin57 is right about most kids on the spectrum being visual learners, some are not strictly visual.  My son turned out to be one who had an easier time learning math facts by hearing them or in a song than by flash cards or posting them on the wall.  And he could narrate much better after hearing material read to him, but that is not as true now since his reading level has improved.

    I would recommend looking into PECS cards, though, for visual reinforcement for everything from daily routines, personal hygiene, to math, social studies, and science.  You can make them or print them yourself.  There are Pinterest boards with lots of ideas for these.  A word of warning (if this might apply to you):  make them sturdy and laminated if possible….they can get torn up or crumpled in the midst of a meltdown.  Just sayin’….

    Sue
    Participant

    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.

    mrsmccardell
    Participant

    My dd10 is slowly learning to read using ABeCeDarian.  There are no rules to remember so she can read books early on in the program and have those important successes!  There is a book geared for homeschooling too.  We’re also practicing phonograms based on Reading Lessons through Literature which we use for my other dc.  ABeCeDarian is very open and go with no prep work.  We tried AAR but there was way too much prep work and too many rules.

    I agree with the routine part as well and I tend to struggle with this myself.  We attempt routines but something always comes up!  I am trying to be more disciplined in this area this year.

    Keep it simple and be involved…join them in painting, exploring, etc.  Take the time to train them without worrying about where they stand on grade level.  Meet them where they are and stretch them as indicated.  I’m preaching to myself bc I’m always ready for her to move along after a few tries but she may not be ready.

    Have fun rv’ing!

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