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Curricula and Learning Links - Special Needs

How to Help Your Autistic Child

By Caron

What has helped me try to tease out how to help my son with high-functioning autism (Yes, that's a label, but that immediately gives the knowledgeable reader some idea of what his obstacles are.) has been to take a number of approaches:

  1. We did get an "official" medical diagnosis. That was not so helpful in of itself. It wasn't harmful, but it hasn't be particularly helpful educationally except that I knew to limit my online searches to autism-related issues and not other diagnoses.
  2. He was in public school special education for a while. Although there were many drawbacks to this, the benefits were that he often WAS placed with knowledgeable educators who were also speech-language pathologists. Watching the better ones of them gave me ideas about how to approach his education after we initially brought him home. I am definitely not suggesting that you place your child in public school! It often (usually?) is not a good idea. However, it is not uniformly a bad idea, either. It depends on the specific school district.
  3. Attending special needs and other workshops at homeschooling conferences.
  4. Very helpful was reading extensively on homeschooling special needs boards and lists. In particular, I've asked (or read) about specific difficulties that my child has faced and then tried the suggested approaches that seemed to best apply to our situation.

It does help to be specific and to give details about what the individual problem is. I have found that people want to try to help, but can get overwhelmed and not know where to begin if the question is too broad and/or too vague. I can just imagine the kind of judgmental comments I would get if others didn't know about my son's diagnosis. But since they do know about it, the comments we get (if any) tend to be complimentary and/or otherwise constructive without being derogatory.

Recommended Resources:
The Out of Sync Child
Understanding the Nature of Autism And Asperger's Disorder
AudiBlox
Also see HomeschoolChristian.com's Special Needs section

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