Curriculum for a K'er w/ASD

[Shahrazad]

My son is 5.5 and has ASD w/speech + language delays, auditory processing issues, and difficulty with expressive communication. He has improved a lot with these delays and is now doing so much better with the communication and quite a bit better with auditory processing. We've taken a bit of a break from school while we sorted everything out but now he wants to get back in to it and I think he's at a good point to resume. However, I am looking for some curriculum advice. I don't know if anyone can help me but I know if anyone has an idea, it will be you resourceful ladies ;). Until now, my style has been very much anti-screen time and I wanted to stay away from technology in our school room. I have been using Oak Meadow as the backbone of our homeschool along with other things. Although I like OM, we had a lot of trouble moving through because OM's style is often geared toward children being read stories and working from there and he still has a lot of trouble following a story read to him, especially without pictures. While we were taking a break, I was finishing up a really intensive class myself so I broke down and relied a bit (maybe too much) on Netflix for him while I studied. He primarily liked to watch Wild Kratts and some dinosaur documentaries and I realized that he was absorbing and learning so much from them. He started talking about concepts that he would never have understood before had I spoken about them with him and often times he would tell me something and I would be so impressed that he knew it and wonder where he'd learned it from until I realized he had gotten it from these shows. He also started making his own connections from what he learned and expanding on them on his own. While I certainly don't want to just sit him in front of a show and call it school, I have been wondering whether there may be a better approach for him in utilizing technology and these resources in order to benefit and educate him. Are there any programs that may provide something like this for a child like him? The only subject I think he has been fairly OK with is Math as he seems to get those concepts easily. We've just been using Singapore/Math Mammoth for that.

[LilBearsMama]

My son is 6.5 with ASD, speech/language delays, APD, anxiety, SPD. 

What's working for us is Amish curricula for reading, phonics, handwriting and math. 

LA: 
Pathway readers (and the phonics program, Learning through Sounds)
Pentime (handwriting)
Climbing to Good English

Supplemented with games like Teach Your Monster to Read on the computer, printable games, practice from Usborne readers and McGuffey's New Eclectic Primer. 

Math: 

Main program: Learning Numbers with Spunky (Amish) 

Miquon and MM are used too, depending on what he needs, if he wants to do more math that day, if it's a Friday so it's a bit different day and so on. 

Science: 

Nature study. 
Unit studies like Hands of a Child's lapbook on insects with as much get outside time as possible. 
Kids Encyclopedias 
Videos
And anything hands on he's got an interest in, so I guess "interest led" too. 

Social Studies: 

We do things like go to the fire department. Read a lot - he loves the "If You LIved..." books. Videos. Hands on projects. 

 

[LilBearsMama]

One thing I do - We watch Amazon Prime's videos on bugs. They have a whole series that's only 10-12 minutes long each. 

Then we make a minibook for our lapbook, go bug hunting, look them up in a book or field guide. 

We pull up some videos on youtube. 

Doing this he's forced himself to speak more clearly in order to explain things to his father or great-grandparents. He remembers. And he would do "bug school" every single day if he could. 

This same approach of finding notebooking pages, lapbooks, and projects for other things has worked well too. 


You could also possibly look at things like Time for Learning. They might be a good backup.

[KaceeM]

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[PeterPan]

You wouldn't be the first to find your kid magically starts learning when you stop trying to teach him and give him a medium he can learn from.  My ds is very similar (dyslexia, apraxia, adhd) and he MEMORIZES the tv shows he watches (PM4K, history channel, etc.) but if I read him something from CHOW or do a Bible flannelgraph he remembers very little.  I'd give him the screen time.  The psych suggested to us *earned* time.  So we do our Barton and he EARNS his time to watch those documentaries.  Gets back our balance.

[Hunter]

I used a lot of documentaries and Amish stuff with my 2E spectrum kid, too. I didn't know about Waldorf back then, or I would have used some of that.

 

He liked the little house books and he liked biographies of famous men as children. He liked encyclopedias. He liked a dramatized version of the KJV Bible in audio tape–that was back in the 90's.  :D  He also had dramatized versions of Pilgrims's Progress and the Aeneid. When older he liked learning ancient Greek, and developed a taste for Shakespeare.

 

And of course he LOVED computers. Back in the 90's he would get out of Windows and into DOS and really change things. Not for better or worse, but certainly different. My mom would come over and freak and say, "That can't be done!" I'd tell her that obviously it could be done, since it had been done.

 

He was really good at math, but didn't really care one way or the other about it.

[jnaj]

My 1st grader is on the spectrum, SPD- and is in OT and Speech/Language Therapy. For math she ADORES McRuffy. We are still figuring out which language arts will work best, we have been through a few.. 

 

 As far as computer etc- she loves going to Starfall (we ended up subscribing), and other learning websites. She will sit there forever playing learning games. She has an iPad BUT it has other games etc on it, so she does all kinds of things on there when she has iPad time. I would love to have an iPad dedicated to school/educational stuff. It would be great for on the go learning too.

 

I think documentaries and educational movie/shows are great personally..I find that *I* learn from watching better than other ways since I'm more of a visual person. Following this thread for some ideas. Thanks for posting.

[Aurelia]

He might like Right Start for math. There's a lot of visual, tactile work with the math concepts instead of working through a worksheet. My child isn't on the spectrum, but very much enjoyed Discoveries in Music (uses videos and musical instruments), Atelier Art, and Kinderbach, all of which have a video component to the curriculum. 

 

Other videos she liked a lot and learned from: LeapFrog Talking Letter Factory (and other videos by the same company - basic math and reading), The Jeff Corwin Experience (zoology), The Secret Life of Mammals (zoology), Planet Earth (natural history), Horrible Histories, Wild Kratts, Whistlefritz (Spanish immersion). 

[Mrs. Tharp]

There are programs out there, but a lot will depend on how well he retains information he is not interested in and how tolerant he is of review. My son with ASD also responded very well to visual stuff at that age, but I discovered after awhile that while he was excellent at "gaming programs" to get the right answers, his long term retention was zero. Because the lessons were so "fun", he also became highly resistant to rewatching lessons for review--the point that he needed to learn the material was basically missed. Because of this, I stopped using online resources to teach basic skills. We still love online stuff & documentaries for the content based subjects and of course, for supplements to our regular curriculum.

 

We wound up switching to Rod & Staff for grammar and math and as he got older, SRA for reading comphrension, and now Calvert Spelling and VocabJourney. It has worked out very, very well.