Homeschooling  with Autism

Here is a list of some skills that can help with learning things within your homeschooling routines.

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Attention and Attending Skills

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Attention and Attending skills are sometimes difficult for a person with autism.  Keep in mind that learning and teaching does not necessarily need to begin or be exclusively done at a desk or table.  Find the right environment for your child (be it on the sofa or the floor etc.) where they are comfortable enough to come willingly to an activity to work on or play.  Once you have their attention and they are comfortable with their surroundings, the instruction for the activity can go a very long way which will make teaching easier and learning more effective.  Incorporating different sensory strategies into your homeschooling routine requires the parent and any additional educators to be aware of the specific needs of the student. 

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Imitation and Recognizing Skills

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Imitation skills are an important part of learning at any age throughout life.  Many autistic children learn by copying actions of people or even interactive toys.

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Communication and Non-Verbal Language Skills

 

Students who can’t speak have and will use other ways to communicate to compensate.  Communication is a major and important aspect of a program for a person with autism as many individuals on the autism spectrum characteristically have severe delays in speech and language development.  Difficulty with communication impacts all areas of daily living including learning, behavior and socialization.  For those who are non-verbal, picture/symbol-based forms of communication are fantastic tools to help in this area.  Once there is an understanding of a way to communicate, conversation skills can develop.

 

This can be done with pictures printed on cards or pictures through an app program.   When we first started out, we were using pictures on cards that we had laminated.  They were a great starting point however, I ended up having cards all over my house some of them got misplaced and lost completely.   It got to the point where it just wasn’t practical for us to carry on this way.  We then transitioned over to the program ProLoQuo2Go when it was first introduced.  This was only available through Apple.   We still use it today but we have also added another program called Talk Tablet.  This is available through Android and Windows.

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Motor Skills

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It is quite common that people with autism have certain limitations with motor difficulties.  Activities to help improve motor skills can be beneficial in many ways from basic health, opportunities to participate in sport and leisure, and overall independence in daily living in terms of dressing, feeding, handwriting or typing, and other important areas of life.  There are Fine Motor Skills (holding a pencil, handling change, button and zipper fastenings) and Gross Motor Skills (full body and physical activities).

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Adaptive and Self-Help Life Skills

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Adaptive and Self-help Life Skills are necessary for achieving independence.  Building these skills will help an individual with autism become less dependent on others and more independent in the aspects of their daily life.

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Play and Leisure Skills

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Play is enjoyable to anyone at any age.  You can still learn a great deal while playing and enjoying leisure activities.

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Academic Skills

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Here are the typical academic skills that can be added to your homeschooling routine to help build readiness for future activities:

 

Matching, sorting and sequencing can be adapted for a number of sorting concepts.

 

For our math lessons, we have a strong focus is about learning numbers for the purpose of telling time, measurements and money skills.