Homeschooling with Asperger's Syndrome

Yesterday I sent in my Notice of Intent to homeschool my rising 5th grader son, who has Asperger's Syndrome.

Watching him these last few days, I am struck by how hard life is for him. He just does not have the resiliency, the flexibility, that allows him to change an expectation and adapt. His first recourse is to regress, to fall apart, like a three year old. I am thankful these episodes are, for the most part, short lived. Within a minute, I am able to calm him, to get him to rethink the situation, and to come up with other possibilities of what he COULD have done.

Instead of screaming and throwing himself on the floor when he walked into our home and found the air conditioner off, he could have asked me if he could turn it on, and planted himself over a vent. Instead of screaming and wailing and throwing the light saber on the ground when he "lost" the battle between himself and his brother and another friend, he could have said, "I need to go home now" and vented his frustration here.

I worry about homeschooling him. I cannot allow his anger, frustration, and vocal misery to create an unpleasant climate in our home. I have to rein it in!

We often discuss perception, how a glass can be 50% full of water, and one thirsty person can see it and exclaim, "Great, the glass is half full!" and someone else can see it and wail, "Oh, man! That class is half empty!" Yet it is the same glass. He gets that.

We also talk about the idea of changing the DVD in your head. An expectation is like a DVD in your head of what you think will happen. If something doesn't happen like your DVD says, then you need to eject that DVD and put in a new one with revised expectations. It's no big deal. In fact, it is how people learn. My son gets that too.

But implementation is another issue entirely. I remind him to choose joy and to change his DVD, and he tries, and I need to give him credit for all the times he is successful (just now I heard him agree to play a different game from the one he wanted). But these issues come up at least a dozen times a day, about the most inane things.

I begin to understand why some families turn to medication. When your child is made utterly miserable by the most insignificant things in life, when you feel unable to increase your child's resiliency and flexibility, medication looks like a great option.

I'm not crossing that bridge yet. I want to give him another year, to see if he makes progress in these areas, now that I'm homeschooling him. Wish us luck.

Learning All The Time

Books, Books, and More Books....

Every month, I give away boxes of books to the Salvation Army, AmVets, or whoever shows up at my door to collect them.

Every month, I weed through our homeschool room and cull the books that weren't as good as I thought they'd be, or that my youngest child has outgrown.

And yet, bewilderingly, we are still quite over-run with books.

These four pictures of the homeschool room represent about 20-25% of the books in our home. There are multiple bookshelves in the children's rooms, in my bedroom, in our family room, in our basement, and in boxes in the basement - although I am seriously making an effort to get rid of the books in boxes because if they are in boxes, what is the point of owning them?

I remember when I first fell in love with a book. I was about four, and a visitor to our home brought me a beautifully illustrated book, "Snow White and Rose Red". My mother was too busy to read it to me, and I was tortured all day looking at the lovely pictures and wondering what the text said, waiting for my father to get home. That was also the day I decided I absolutely, positively, had to learn how to read myself. And I did so, in short order.

When I was a few years older, my parents divorced. My mother viewed books as clutter, so she didn't purchase them for us, but she took us to the library regularly, feeding my obsession with the written word. We spent weekends with our father, and he took us to Toys R Us twice a month to get a treat. Without fail, I always bought a book - first the Bobbsey Twins, then Nancy Drew.

And I've always considered it one of my prime responsibilities as a parent to turn my kids into bookworms. I'd say I've done a pretty good job; how many kids would read a book while they are blowing out their birthday candle?



As a homeschooler, I make it a point to use "living books" (appealing books that delight kids with new ideas and thoughts and ways of looking at or interacting with the world) rather than textbooks whenever possible.

As a homeschooler, I see exactly how books affect my kids, how my kids connect what they read to their lives. I see what resonates with them. I see exactly what interests them, and what arouses their curiosity.

And as a homeschooler, I have truly come to appreciate books as the profound gifts they are. Books are an irresistable invitation to experience the world through someone else's eyes; to be transported to another time, or another place; to learn about something, or how to do something.

Well anyway. Time to go figure out my Scholastic books order....

Learning All The Time Too