First Day Homeschooling My Autistic Son

Today has been interesting. It is our first day home schooling and both my son and I have some adjusting to do. I decided to play it by ear. I wanted to concentrate on his weakness with his writing skills by using his strengths in his academics.

My son is extremely intelligent. It is going to be challenging for me to keep him academically challenged. I was going to start him off with Pre-Algebra, but he wanted to go straight into Algebra. It has been a long time since I did Algebra. I may have to call on my husband to help me with it. Since he is already tutoring his mom and niece with their Algebra, it should be no problem for him to also tutor our son.

I set up the dry erase board on the table for us to work with. My son and I sat at the table and actually worked for thirty minutes straight with the Algebra. I was happy that he was able to stay on task with me for that long. I pushed him a little. When he started showing signs of wanting to stop, I made him continue for a few minutes longer.

We had to do hand over hand for the writing of each problem. I noticed that the more we did, the less assistance I had to give him to form the numbers on the board. I think that working everyday this way will improve his writing skills and am hoping to have him independently writing out his math problems in a couple of months. We’ll see.

I gave him a break and then we returned to the table for handwriting. I have a box of cards with words on them and used them to get him to write. Again, we had to do hand over hand. He has some letters that he can do himself, but there are still a lot that he isn’t sure about how to form. Again, I saw improvement the more we did.

After we did the words, I decided to work on his drawing skills. That was tough. He hated it. We used the dry erase board and worked on drawing simple pictures together. He whined and kept trying to get up, but I made him keep at it. All together, we only worked for about thirty minutes on the writing and drawing. The main point of this was that we actually did it in one sitting.

I am thrilled that I was able to get two sessions of thirty minute continuous work done today. Of course, I had to fit at least one more thing into today. We sat together and started reading from his Civics and Economics book. I was worried that this might be too advanced, but he enjoyed it. I was also able to sneak in some writing by doing a couple of suggested activities in the reading. He didn’t like it, but we got it done. This time, we only worked for ten minutes. He just seemed like he had reached his limit.

I would have liked to have spent more time doing school work today, but we did accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. Tomorrow, my daughter has the day off because of Teacher Work day. I’ll use this as an opportunity to go to the library and to do a couple of craft projects.

My husband had joked around the other day that I could use his old communication folder to log what we did each day. It sounded like a joke, but I knew that he was really hoping that I would do it. He likes knowing what our boy is doing. I decided to do it. It will also serve as a good way to track our progress. All in all, I think that this is going to work out well. I really think I made the right decision by home schooling my son.