Home education for year 1

[someoneoutthere]

Hi, I am thinking about home educating my DS who is nearly 6 and has been going to a special need school, he has asd. He is summer born, so technically should be in year 2, but I want to start with year one curriculum. I can't find a school that is wiling to take him on (we are in the U.A.E) and he has kind of outgrown the need to go to a special need school. I mean he still has speech delay, so he will need to continue seeing a speech therapist, but he is behaviourally alright. The school he is going to at present mainly does behavioural intervention and all the children there have severe autism, most being non-verbal. Unfortunately DS has started copying their behaviour and it has now come to the point that it's doing him more harm than good socially. Also they don't follow a national curriculum, so although DS has no learning difficulties, he is educationally falling behind. For example, he has learnt his phonics sounds when he was 2 and half, after nearly 3 years of not doing any educational staffs, he is forgetting his phonics.

I am completely new to home education, have no idea how to go about it and need to start from scratch. I need guidance and hand holding about how to go about setting up a home education programme for DS. Where do I start, what to I need?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Wow, so many more posts, I haven't come back to the thread thinking it's inactive. Thank you everyone. Ds is progressing really well with reading and writing, he can blend odd words and can read small sentences made out of the words he mastered a sight word. His writing is also more legible. I have not made much progress with other subjects yet, but we have been focusing hard on reading. I will look into all the suggestions tomorrow morning when I am not half a sleep.

Inflatable globe, what a great idea!! I have already become a member of he-special, but they tend to deal with older kids more.

Estland, is 'Reading lessons' better for teaching children blending? We are doing headsprout and on episode 34, DS is not getting the blending yet. We still have a lot more lessons to do on it (80 in total). But DS really has not had much reading lessons, as I understand that an average child at school has 400 lessons before they start reading.

Notatschool, thank you for the curriculum link. It's fantastic.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I can explain or teach DS concept like 'more', 'bigger', 'less'. DS has ASD, and I have been trying to explain this with sweets (his fav reward atm), but no luck.

you can pour stuff from one container to another and notice that the bigger container will hold more, while the smaller one will overflow. you can also cut up a pie/cake that someone likes and ask which piece they want and then point out they took the bigger piece. when you shop you can look at the label to see how many grams something weighs and then say that this one has got more than the other one. i personally think that people make use of these abstract concepts a long time before they can formalise a definition, so they need experience.

with ASD i guess you'd need extra help to see the connection between all these disparate objects and experiences, else it would just be one separate distracting instance or event after another seemingly without any cohesion?

Try cups of water: a bucket, a cup, and egg cup and a thimble. Also try with T shirts: Daddys, Mummys, his and one from a baby.
Also just use the words a lot. So half fill his cup. "Would you like more?" Maybe a vegetable he doesn't like, give him a plate of it, and ask if he wants less?

For science do do floating and sinking. Then you can move on to which falls faster, including a flat sheet of paper and the same sheet crumpled. Also teach him to observe, see clouds, watch whatever wild life, how does he feel when he has been sitting for a while, how aout after he's been running? And so on.

Thank you FJN and mummy time. Great ideas, off to practice with ds and will be back with updates later.

I sent you a message. I too live in the UAE (for now).