ok loads of questions, here is number one

[yawningmonster]

Right on the brink of pulling ds out as he simply is not coping and nor is the school but a little terrified....

1. I am leaning more towards the natural learning bent but do have some wobbles...I already strew and follow his lead with interests but he has no desire what so ever for anything to lead anywhere. I have read all these beautiful stories of following an interest and then it leading on and on....ds is more of the put minimal effort into the activity, participate in the activity and then full stop. So for example in the last couple of days he has had a bit of an interest in doing experiments from one of his books....

he wanted to make a lava lamp on the premise that I got all the ingredients out...he happily combined the ingredients but is not at all interested in anything to do with the whys of the experiment, similarly he now wants to do the "rubber bones" experiment of putting chicken bones in vinegar so they are bendy...not at all interested in the why only in the actual process of the experiment....is this ok or am I doing something wrong...not engaging him enough, not found a true interest that really sparks him wanting to find more out. Most of my feels he is just right for him and if he just wants to do for now then there must be something valid in that for him even if it is just visual information that the oil and water didn't mix, physical control as he pours ingredients in, measuring ingredients etc.... It just seems that all the blogs that I read the children follow it through with further interest in finding out more if it is done right which leads me to feel I don't do it right and therefore will be completely useless in meeting his needs if I pull him out...though can't do much worse than current situation at school

Thoughts and advice welcome

How old is he? And how long has he been at school? Have you read about deschooling ( for him and you)?
Natural learning may look nothing like you expect. He may never want to follow a science experiment through - I had this worry with my son and then I realised that I also had no idea why bicarb and vinegar foam without looking it up and it doesn't seem to have affected my life (in fact I did science at unj), nor decreased my enjoyment of making bicarb volcanoes. Natural learning is certainly not doing things they would have done at school but being self-motivated ( although for some children it may look like that sometimes). At our house natural learning look like dancing, bouncing, watching tv, playing with Lego, water play,sand play,baking, playing on the iPad, swimming, drawing, going to the park, chatting and whatever else comes up.
Have you looked Alan Thomas 'How Children Learn at Home'? He interviewed home educating families about how their children learnt - really useful book.

"Most of my feels he is just right for him and if he just wants to do for now then there must be something valid in that for him even if it is just visual information that the oil and water didn't mix, physical control as he pours ingredients in, measuring ingredients etc...."

I think you are spot on there. If your son is engaged with what he is doing, he is learning something from it. It can be hard for anyone else to observe exactly what is being learned, but if you look at him in a few years' time you will notice that he knows all sorts of things which you never taught him. It is a great mystery.

He isn't taking away what you were expecting him to take away from it. He is achieving his own objectives, which even he might be unable to articulate.

My seven year old recently worked her way through the contents of a science kit. I don't think she absorbed any of the concepts which the people who developed the kit intended her to learn. But I can catch a small glimmer of entirely different things which she is learning. Being something of a mad inventor, she combined various pieces of the science kit into contraptions of her own. It was all I could do to refrain from objecting, "But you won't be able to do the water pressure demonstration if you take that to bits and scatter them through the house!" but I could see that the water pressure demonstration was just not on her agenda and might never be. A dolly-lifting contraption was on her agenda. She is getting really good at problem-solving and sourcing suitable materials for the things she wants to make. At other times she appears to be "just playing" and I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess at what she is learning in that moment. But I have no doubt that she is learning.

So yes, you are doing it exactly right.

One of the most valuable lessons for me was: to let go of the outcome. If you can't let go of the outcome, then that's OK as long as you acknowledge it.

An example: I acquired a variety of chemistry sets from jumble sales and car boot sales. I casually presented them to my son and said wouldn't it be fun if we did some experiments. He ignored this. Later he randomly mixed a few things with a few other things, while I disingenuously said "we need to keep track of this, I'll write it down". He then lost interest.

I cringe to remember now but I think at some point I was reluctant to abandon my idea of how it should be so I did a few experiments myself in a contagiously gosh this is fun and interesting sort of way, but he didn't take the bait.

Around 5 years later he was with a friend and fetched the boxes off the shelf. They shook various powders into various other powders for a while, making up stories about explosions etc, then tried burning a couple of things, then left it.

In a whole other arena though, completely uninfluenced by me, he developed rigorous testing methods for computer programming. Because he saw a point to it where you keep track because you want to stop getting it wrong.

Thank you. I do think that while on know on an intellectual level that he learns in a completely different way to me and that try as I might to find out I actually don't know how he learns, knowing it and actually getting over myself and allowing it to be that way is another story. I am terribly afraid of listening to the voices in my head that say "he doesn't do this, that or the other because of something I have or have not done" Essentially I don't want to let him down. I think I am with peace with the concept of I can't do things any worse than they are at the moment so I can be the best of bad options which sort of takes the pressure off being THE OPTIMAL choice and everything resting on my shoulders to get things right if that makes sense.

This leads to my next question...at the moment he has access to some specialist support which we pay for through me working...if I home school I simply can't afford these as options -to be honest I don't know if anything that he has specialist support for is helping him or not. (He currently has access to Occupational Therapy, Music Therapy and a social skills support group. He has been with the triple s group for 4 years and to be honest I am not too concerned if this goes as it has made pretty much zero difference to him and he is very indifferent to going. He loves music therapy so would be gutted to see that go and OT...I just don't know with this one. One side of me says this may be his only chance of writing, of coping with sensory input, of gaining a multitude of physical skills that he doesn't currently have some of which he may wish to have and some of which he may not need (for example he may never want to ride a bike or scooter where as he may want to be able to keep his balance and maintain enough stamina to complete tasks.