Homeschooling autism during lockdown.

I’ve been teaching in secondary schools for twenty years, yet I’m struggling to educate my six year old autistic son at home.

He has no interest whatsoever in engaging in any kind of formal learning. Edward’s school sent him home with a folder with some great activities in. I have read him the social story about why his school is closed due to the coronavirus. Other than that I haven’t been able to engage him at all. At his school it took them a few months before they could get Edward to do any formal work and even then they could only do it if he could write underneath a table or on a window or on the floor. I know that Edward responds well to the school environment, he knows what he has to do at school and how it is different to being at home. So now he’s home, he’s not going to do school work because…well…it’s home isn’t it?

So what have I managed to do with him? Firstly, I’ve found a great app called Reading Eggs and Edward has been happy to sit with me for five minutes and play some of the games on that.

We are really lucky to live right next to some woodland so we have been going for lots of walks in them and Edward loves picking up sticks and leaves.

Lego is another thing that he loves. I’m a believe that it’s good to leave him to his own devices when playing with Lego because it helps with his creativity. So far, he has made rockets, the Starship Enterprise and cars.

Edward’s teacher is sending lots of ideas home so we’ll always have a go at doing some of them. This week, the theme is Dinosaurs. We have made a few attempts at making the letter ‘d’ with anything. We have tried leaves (but they blew away) and chocolate eggs (but Edward kept running in and kicking them away.) Oh well, we won’t give up!

So that’s my efforts of autism homeschooling. I’m not stressing about it though and I’m going to use this time to do some toilet training and work on his personal hygiene skills.

How are you guys homeschooling? Post your comments below.