Home education

[rainsuncloud]

Hi I am thinking of home educating my DS, I am having trouble getting him into school, he has aspergers and is very anxious and petrified of school. Any information or ideas anyone may have to what to teach my DS, eg science, maths, english, would be great. And also does anyone know how many hours is compulsary teaching for Home education. And would that include sports, cooking etc. He is in year 7, age 11. Thank you

rainsuncloud, Is he not in school at all, at the moment?

There are no compulsory set hours for home education, although some LA's might tell you differently.
You can do whatever subjects you like, or your son feels he might like to study. I would relax for a bit before embarking on any serious work for your sun if he is anxious and frightened. Give him and yourself time to settle into Home Ed before launching straight into it.

or ''son'' even.

i would highly recommend joining your local home ed groups, search yahoo groups for home ed xx area. that'll give you some ideas on what group activities are available nearby.

with home ed you can pretty much study what you want, when you want. there are many many different ways to go about it, you'll experiement until you find what works for you.

there are loads of websites out there, i like to use bbc learning, tes.co.uk and kidshealth.org.

Lots of people with aspie HE'ed children just give up on the whole idea of an adult-imposed curriculum. He's aspie. He has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Just follow that thirst, and help him pursue whatever the current obsession is. No need to be formal and school-y about it at all, but when you are feeling anxious, you can just have a little sit and observe at how the current craze is actually teaching him loads about x, y, z.

Read Alan Thomas and thingy, How children learn at home.

Hi Thank you everyone for your info.

No he is trying to go in to school, at the moment he is going in for 20 minutes just to the special needs unit in the morning. Its a long story. All on another thread on 'school refusal'. Feel like I am fighting a losing battle with the school though. We just can't carry on the way we are going and feel that Home Education may be the answer. The only thing is, when I was working with him last week, (work that the school sent home), he was a bit of a nightmare and hard to get motivated, as wasn't very interesting work for him.

I need him to be interested to get him motivated to do the work I think.

You'll need to forget anything that looks like school work for a good long recovery time. Rule of thumb is one month per year spent in school, but it can be longer if (like your child) there is trauma involved.

NB please don't call it "school refusal". It's a perfectly rational response to what is, for your child, an alien, hostile and traumatic environment. the education professionals are invested in telling you that it is something WRONG with your child. It really isn't - it's just that the school environment is so wrong for him that he simply cannot be there. All power to him.

My advice: just get him out of the system, and spend a few months having a pretend summer holiday together - go on trips, do fun things at home, just learn to have fun again.

In the short term - don't hassle him, or make him do anything that looks at all like school. He needs to get over the feelings of stress and failure first. You can think of it like the long summer holiday if that helps - a chance to unwind and think about other things.

When he does feel like doing a bit more, try not to think in terms of "school subjects" as this is likely to only stress both of you. Instead, think of what you hope he will get out of this whole stage of his life - that's what "education" is about, not neat little sections with a test at the end.

So at his age you probably still want him to be improving his reading skills, reading a variety of different kinds of things and picking out relevant information from them. And improving his numeracy - that might be thinking about the practical uses of numbers, like sorting out busfares and checking change, or it might be more complex stuff, depending on his interests. And presenting information that he has pulled together - that might be making up a project file, or a Powerpoint presentation, or a huge wallchart. It might include written info, diagrams, graphs, whatever, or it might be something more imaginative.

Add in something that allows him to be creative (could be art, could be writing computer programs, could be icing cakes!), and some exercise, and he'll be getting an education suitable to him, which is what he needs.

It's fine if he gets all the things I've mentioned by reading up on WWII tanks, or the Pyramids, or Warhammer, or any other subject that he finds interesting - you have to let him start from what is interesting to him, and encourage him to develop useful skills from it, rather than trying to force him to show an interest in reading "Jane Eyre" or whatever just because it is on this year's syllabus. From my (little) experience of Aspergers, he will find some subjects fascinating, and others utterly boring and pointless, and not have much ability to pretend otherwise. School will be failing him because they expect their pupils to have (or at least pretend) a moderate level of interest in everything they are told to learn. You don't need to start from there, as you only have one "learner" to encourage, so work with who he is rather than a package of one-size-fits-all, and he'll be fine.