Just wondering how many parents here have been homeschooling their Asperger or High Functioning Autism kids (or even other similar diagnoses ... PDD-NOS, etc.) ... did you start from the preschool age? Or took them out of school later on? We keep wondering what to do with our younger one who is turning 3 in March. I know I can get him socialized in other settings and he has zero cravings for that kind of structured setting that school offers (unlike DS4 who started 3 months ago in special ed preschool and is absolutely thriving). I know we still have plenty of time to think about all this but if we want to go the traditional public school route, he will need to go to special ed preschool to start getting used to the routines and everything else vs. if we decide homeschooling is better for him, we wouldn't have to worry about any of this for another 2 years (well, we would unoficially homeschool or more so unschool).

I keep thinking that the school will be so wrapped up in working on his shortcomings that all his strong points will be overlooked. ... and that would be such a shame ... he's our "genius baby" (and by that I don't mean he's an actual genius, so don't take me wrong! lol ... but he is the one that does all kinds of crazy advanced things just teaching himself ... picking it up from TV, games, books so I think homeschool approach would work great for him!). I want him to be the smart independent boy he is (though little less independance wouldn't hurt either!) and don't like how so many "specialists" just concentrate on breaking his current behavior but none gets him for who he is. ... sorry ... I'm rambling at this point.

Has he ever been in preschool before? I would suggest trying out a part-time preschool a few days a week and just see how he does. Find out about your local school and how they handle 2e kids. Some public schools allow children to be home schooled, but then come to school a few days a week for certain classes with their agemates or for special ed services in areas that require it.

My son has PDD-NOS, and if I could go back in time and find a way to home school him instead of sending him to school, I would do it 100x over. This year (3rd) has been pretty good, but K-2nd was TERRIBLE. Traumatizing. Awful. I don't have enough words. I did not/do not have the option of homeschooling him though.

we will have the option to put him into public school district preschool 2.5hrs / day 5 days a week (just like the older one is in) but he would most likely require a one-on-one aid for now. When we faced the decision with DS4 as he aged out of Early Intervention we decided against the preschool and any school services back then and waited one whole year and now he went in after he turned 4 and we have zero regrets. He was NOT ready the year before and now really wanted to go. But he's our outgoing child. DS2.10 is a loner who wants to do his own thing, learn his own thing and will come when he needs us or help but is very independent. So maybe we'll give it another year and re-evaluate? Or we can try the preschool for couple weeks and if it's too much of a disaster then we'd pull him out maybe? We're not sure if we can pull of homeschooling but if it's something that we find REALLY needed, we'd do it.

Are there any local private pre-schools you can afford? Those are often a bit easier to test the waters with - you can often observe the classrooms, drop them off/pick them up when you want - which is good when trying to get them to adjust.

that would probably be a total disaster! I'm guessing he'd be kicked out right the first day! lol The public special ed preschool is most likely the only option since they would HAVE to work with him. He can't even stand to be at the library story time for more than 2 minutes. But does like going to a local play area ... kind of like a children's museum type of place where there isn't really any structure but he still gets the exposure to other adults and kids.

If we had been able to get a dx for our DS10 in time, I would definitely have used the special needs preschool. We did not have that option, but I wish we had.

Our therapy team has strongly advocated keeping DS in public school; at one point I looked at all other options, including homeschooling, but for a kid with AS who really needs tons of practice to learn what's expected of him in public settings, a public school with good support truly is the best place to be.

DS learned no really significant academic content for about the first three years, but he learned a TON about what was expected of him in behavior, group settings, and managing relationships with peers. It was not always pretty. But now I see him functioning well and with increasing independence at school and in other public places and I know we did the right thing. He will actually be able to hold a job (which I really doubted when he was younger), largely because he now understands how to accept instruction, work in a team, and be resilient when things get challenging.

For us, this was the right course, and we are starting to see the rewards.
DeeDee

I guess the big reason why I am so "shy" about all the therapy and special ed and all is that I see DS respond so much better to me than anyone else! I can get him to do a lot without too much pushing whereas when the therapists try to push, he shuts down for them. He can't stand that approach. So why put him somewhere where he'd be stressed all day / half day when he can be happy at home and still making a great progress? I know he can't always be just with me and I make sure he isn't ... but he seems to respond to me so much better than others so I keep thinking why not take advantage of it and homeschool?

I went to a Tony Attwood all day seminar last year and he was asked about homeschooling, his response is that in most cases he thinks kids with Aspergers can do ok in primary school (k-6 or k-7 here, depending on state) and it is to their benefit to go, but if your child is not coping by all means consider homeschooling, particularly in early highschool (7-9 or 10), when the "normal" children are little animals (his words not mine). He was not talking specifically about gifted children but he was very clearly talking about very high functioning children.

He also strongly advised dropping your child off and picking them up if there was any risk of bullying while getting too and from school.

That said I would like to gently suggest that the fact that he works well with you but not other people is a part of his diagnosis, and one that most definitely needs to be (gently) worked on.

bullying is definitely something that I am worried about with both boys past preschool ... all Kindergarten kids here take the same bus as 6th graders since our elementary is K-6.

He will also still receive private therapy through a place where our older one goes and he already knows the place and the staff and is fairly ok in that setting.

Often a child with autism has one person (usually the mom) that they do this with. As Mum3 says, it's part of the deal with this diagnosis. Often it means that they've trained you to give them what's easy for them and doesn't stretch their capacities.

Yes, being in the special needs preschool would be hard for him. It's serious work to learn social skills for any preschooler, and for an autistic preschooler this is very difficult. But it also gives him the best shot at having the skills to do okay in school and life later.

Keeping the medium and long term in mind, you need him to develop flexibility that he doesn't yet have. Doing things that you don't feel like doing isn't just an unreasonable chore, it's part of life, and if he doesn't learn to do that when necessary he won't be employable.

My feeling is, no matter how much easier it would have been on my DS to keep him home, it was much better for him to be forced to be flexible. And as with the food stuff I described in my other post today, he learned what we taught him: he is so much more flexible now, which opens horizons for him that aren't possible for a person with rigid habits that feel like "needs" but are really just rigid habits. Adults who are not able to bend to the needs of others aren't very functional or pleasant: they often come across to others as spoiled, selfish, and petulant, even if there's a good reason why they're inflexible.

This may sound hard-hearted, but it's not. It's just a matter of getting over the hump toward something that's really going to make his life better over the long run. If we hadn't pushed DS10 to overcome his fear of the woods, he wouldn't be an accomplished hiker and camper today. If we hadn't insisted he eat a varied diet, he still wouldn't, and we'd hardly be able to eat out or travel. Autism can shrink a person's world; if through parenting choices we can expand it again, it makes a better life.

DS is signing up for sleepaway camp this summer and thinks he might miss us *a little*, but he knows he'll be fine. I'm really proud of him; he worked hard to get to this point.

DeeDee

I had to cut my previous comment short so here's the rest ...

it drives me crazy to see how they approach him in therapy (with the exception of one therapist who seems to really get him). Especially speech therapy ... they treat him like a low functioning 2 year old in an almost 3 year old body and that's why I think he gets so frustrated. I tried to convince the therapist to use his skills that he already has. Why keep pushing him to say "blow bubbles" so the therapist would blow bubbles for him ... he's a very visual learner. The kid can read a lot of words ... WRITE down for him "blow bubbles" and he'll read it and use it with no problem! She keeps pushing and pushing and he can be approach so much easier if you use his strengths!

A lot of reading I've done talks about play therapy. Join him in his play rather than constantly keep trying to get him to join you. He gets frustrated when he's treated like he has no brain.

So, as I said before, we'll probably give the preschool a shot but if we see him being more unhappy and frustrated, we will pull back and work with him at home.

For the first time EVER today he actually let me read a book to him ... and he enjoyed it! Just kicking back and relaxing while I was reading. Something I didn't think would ever happen. ... one of those things where I really see we're making progress!

I definitely see why you are bothered, it doesn't sound like they get how to utilize what he can do, but I would also suggest that looking at the therapist and conversing with her is a different skill to reading something to her. Reading is not conversing or making a request...

Like wise it's really worth using a child's own interests to engage them in play - BUT one of the features of a child with ASD is that they want to play THEIR play, their way, by their rules, with all other players really only being tools for their play. I imagine it is a very conscious choice on the therapist's part that they are not playing his games his way but instead trying to work on joining in with others, doing new things, doing them new ways, etc.

They may possibly be failing to realise and utilise his intelligence, but both the examples you have given I am guessing that there is an actual therapeutic reason for what they are doing. It sounds like you need to have a talk with them and find middle ground where they acknowledge his skills and interests but still work on the deficits it seems like they are trying to address?

His main early intervention speech therapist is fairly freshly out of school and I don't think she has much experience beyond "normal" speech delayed kids under 3. Pretty much no experience with autistic or gifted kids . She just can't seem to be able to think outside of the school-taught box. His developmental therapist on the other hand is probably little over 50 years old and has worked with autistic kids and gets him ... as soon as she got to know him, she started bringing more advanced toys and activities and has been able to engage him a lot more and I don't think he's ever ... not ONCE thrown a tantrum while with her.

So I think what I really need to do at this point is focus on finding a new speech therapist (since he's out of EI in 2 months) who has experience with both, gifted and autistic rather than just a general language pathologist? And not worry much about school just yet and let him mature a little more and then maybe start the preschool in September (vs. starting right away in March)

That sounds like a top plan.

My hunch is that the preschool might be able to provide speech therapy that's more integrated with other activities. The earlier you start, the better, IMO. Getting a child with a speech delay "caught up" takes time, but once he's talking his gifts will be more visible to people besides you.

DeeDee

Hi MK,
I think most important is the social, and that it is important to observe the public special ed preschool that they will be placing him in. My son was offered same, and initially I did place him, but it was ultimately a bad experience because of the range of abilities in the class. Many were lower end vs high functioning. As a result there was alot of noise and often confusion in the class, and my DS didn't do well with this. Not many of the students were verbal, for various reasons- &I felt it was important that he was around kids who were speaking- to help facilitate his own language development.

I didn't feel his own individual needs were being met. Other things were brought to my attention and I chose to pull him from the program, thankfully he was still able to access the school districts Speech/OT services.

I made sure that he was involved in a weekly playgroup- all neurotypical peers, ranging from toddlers to age 5/6. We met each week for several hours at parks etc and celebrated all holidays with parties, as well as birthday parties, we must have been going to about 2parties a month! **I believe the time he spent with this group was a huge help in his social skills! He would have never received this peer interaction at school all day! ((These kids were NTs and not in school though some did do private preschool in am a few days a wk)

I also took him EVERYWHERE !!!
I treated him no differently, and I just exposed him to as much as I could... Don't laugh but we spent a lot of time at COSTCO haahaaa "warehouse therapy" LOL

I was also fortunate enough to get ongoin NPA Speech/OT services, and that was another huge HUGE help in his overall development, because they were all very into pragmatics vs the school based therapists.

His 2nd year of preschool, I flat out refused the preschool program on grounds he was too high functioning, and thankfully the teacher also agreed that it would be more of a deterrent than benefit for him.

When he was closer to turning 5, I was told he must do kindergarten to continue services. I was fortunate enough to place him in a Transitional Kinder program, all the kids were (mostly) NTs age 4 turning 5 (like DS) that fall. We were also Blessed in that the Speech Therapist at he school was a firm believer in Pragmatics!! He rec'd alot thru her. So this was te 3rd HUGE help! This class focused on the social aspects of school ie routines, groups participation etc. *no one ever suspected he had autism, and he continues to be friends with several of the boys from this class, even though they all fanned out into different schools!

Which leads DS to this current year, he started public kinder as a 5yo turning 6. Even though they were given no true kinder curric the previous year, he was completely bored etc and w/o reposting everything we went thru- (like your child MK my DS was also reading before age 3)

I am Happily Homeschooling DS as a kindgartner
but- Thru the Public School- it is an independent study program, so all curric is provided and he is currently in kinder, but the teacher we meet with for 1hour/wk, after assessing him, is having him do the 1st gr curric and she has told me she believes he is "gifted" and that she is gathering "evidence" of his work to present when the time is needed... He is just about ready to move into the 2nd grade curric if she will let him.

I forgot to add, that I did get him started in Adaptive Skills program last year, 10hrs/wk, it is all play based therapy. (not ABA at all) And thru this therapy he has continued to really move forward in leaps and bounds!

Finally, I have just learned that he has been once again "verified" as gifted, and depending on lottery results, may possibly be able to attend a Magnet school for the highly gifted, next year as a 1st grader!

I truly believe you know what is best for your child. I learned early on when he started Adaptive Skills (age 4 3/4), thru the Child Dev Psych that everything I had been doing all along- was all based on the play therapy model they incorporated. This approach isn't right for everyone, I know many who prefer ABA, and one kiddo who began in ABA but is transferring over to this type of therapy. It all really just depends on your childs individual make up and needs.

This board has provided me a huge amount of information and support and you've received lots of good advice already
Please let us know what you decide for your little one!
take care
PS
deedee! Sleepaway Camp!!! I love that! I am with you in introducing our kids to many and all we can, and encouraging them to try new things. Sounds like your kiddo is well on his way

DeeDee ... we would definitely do speech therapy through school no matter what ends up happening with the preschool program. DS4 went through once a week small group ST at school before he started the preschool program and the approach there was much better than EI speech therapy.

cc6 ... thanks for your experience! Your son sounds very much like our little guy! I will look into the Adaptive Skills therapy. That's something new to me!

If we refuse the preschool, we can still get speech through school. The way it works here is they offer a range of services based on his needs and we can accept all or some.

He is still 2.5 years away from K so I am considering starting him on K curriculum informally a year earlier. K is not mandatory here so one of our options is start him a year early homeschooling both K & 1st and then he could go straight to 2nd basically doing an unofficial grade skip (of course, if he's somewhat ready for it socially when the time comes). If not, then we'd probably keep homeschooling.

Here the school doesn't really get involved in anything related to homeschooling. The school "can" accept partime homeschoolers if there are spaces available but those not full time at public school do not receive services like speech therapy and such so then we'd have to go the private route for speech.

There IS still a good chance that just like with our older one, his speech will really take off in the next couple of months. He too went from 10 words at 26 months and still no sentences at almost 3 years old to speaking in full sentences and just weeks later and now close to 4.5 he speaks well beyond his years. Plus we are doing two languages with both of them, which makes it harder too.

hi, i just popped on! saw this reply,
wanted to clarify that it was soley for purpose of cont to receive speech, that we did "independent study" thru district, vs homeschool.
the other plus is curric is free!
and he is allowed to participate in his homeschool activities etc if wans to.
and--- he can get a full IQ work up thru the school

if doing straight homeschool (i could as filed affidavit) he wouldn't rec any of that.

trade off of mtg with teacher 1hr/wk is not horrible.
since i am working at my DS pace, it all good!
mostly ;)~

oh- re speech- my DS speech excellent- it really is all about the pragmatics at this point "social speak" i call it
*sounds like you have formulated great plan for your guy!

Well, since in IL school isn't mandatory till the kids turn 7 years old, I could technically keep him home for another 4 years (while homeschooling the later two) while he would be receiving the speech services through school because he wouldn't have to be officially enrolled yet ... hmmm

In our case it's the opposite-- while dd says I "get her better than anyone else, I'm also one of the very very few who doesn't let her skate. She can work that disability like nobody's business with most people. With me she works harder and with less complaining because she knows it doesn't work.

We homeschooled through the mid-grades (fourth through eighth) with a couple of abortive attempts at the public gifted magnet. It worked pretty well for us until eighth grade, which is why she's at the high school now. Her brother (also at the high school) was homeschooled for fourth, fifth and sixth, but did pretty well with the middle school option available, so he was officially enrolled there (though he missed a lot of school time for cultural events, or if we were working on something interesting at home).

That's how things are with my 4-year old ... I get the most out of him and don't let him get away with much. I just gently remind him "who's in charge!" and he goes back into "compliance mode"

We've taken sort of an unofficial break from most therapy the last 2 weeks with DS 2.10 (only kept one OT session that he really enjoys) and he's seriously thriving! I've never seen him engaging so well like the last two weeks ... and started following some simple directions that before he paid zero attention or I had to tell him to do something 5 times and now I say "get your sippy cup" and he looks for it and brings it ... right away! and things like that.

I did notice that as he's trying to talk more, he's not opening his mouth much, which makes all the words sound more like babbling when in fact he's saying words and sentences. It's like he needs some sort of physical speech therapy rather than what he's been receiving. Even when he eats, he takes really small bites rather than opening his mouth much. I have to check into this!

other than that, I really think homeschool might be the way to go with him if we can somehow pull it off when the time comes!