Advice on structuring home education for a six-year-old with autism

[HomeEdInspiration]

I’m looking for ideas for home eduction for a 6 year old . We will be de registering as have had too many difficulties with the school and she has autistic burnout which they haven’t recognised and just push ahead with fines.

I know a lot don’t have a set timetable but we really want to have formal learning hours, how do others with this approach divide time - is morning better for things like maths , reading etc and afternoons for more creative subjects?
-do you educate all year or have the school holidays as time off still?
-At 6 would tutors be a good addition to the schedule?
-I’ve researched and there are a few groups locally I was thinking 2 per week or should it be more ?

Any other ideas welcome !

I home edded my 3 who are all adult now. At 6 we’d work out what groups and sports we wanted to do each week. It worked best for us to have about four days with some group activity in (but lots of the day would still be free) and one day free for outings or play dates or whatever, but it really depends how much your child likes being out.
At that age when we were doing ‘work’ we very much concentrated on basic maths and English and then read lots of books to cover things like history and geography. We did lots of hands on science and art and craft Went to loads of museums and signed up for a lot of home ed trips to various places.
They only had outside teachers for sport, music groups, drama groups and they went to French groups.
I really enjoyed home edding at that age as you can follow their interests and they learn so much just by being able to explore and play.
We did usually break for school holidays as we were usually ready it and a lot of the groups would stop - but we’d still do a bit of reading practice.
I found it did mostly work best to do maths and English in the morning and other things in the afternoons but it depended a bit on when the groups were.
Mostly - enjoy it!

Honestly. What works for your daughter? Are worksheets for hours actually going to work for her?
At that age we did maybe half an hour of formal reading, writing and maths. Everything else was flexible, making or playing. Fun experiments. But I rapidly discovered that too much sit down wasn’t going to work. Follow her lead. We did deliberate learning in the morning and then did clubs etc in the afternoon.
At this age tutors are unnecessary follow your daughters lead with what she is interested in. Be prepared to go down rabbit holes and explore subjects deeply but from lots of different angles. Join HEFA (Home Ed for All) on Facebook if you haven’t already.
We didn’t use tutors until we got to 13.
Good luck

Try making a post on the well trained mind forums. It's mostly Americans, but scheduling shouldn't really be specific to the country

I would be focusing on hands on practical ways to learn within contexts. Some structured formal teaching alongside to back it up but not too much at this age.

Foster a love of reading, lots of experience with money and cooking, weights, etc to apply maths. You can teach the 2, 5 and 10 times table via pennies. Cooking teaches independence. Actively teach tidying / washing up.

History and geography via going out and about, follow their interests as much as possible. Junk modelling and experience with clay and paper mache. (Gummed brown paper makes a good cheat’s papier mache)

I would find out HOW she learns best. It’s really varies and she’s so young. For context mine was 12 (AuDHD) when we were forced to home ed and it took months trying different things for a routine pattern to emerge. we now cover 3 subjects a day (it started as 1hour) always have some form of exercise & she has hours of self development project time in which she follows her own interests. This has led to various things like learning a language, watch films in that language, trying to make the food from that culture, visiting places linked to that culture. She set up a slime making mini business, she’s learnt new graphic design skills and animation software ..all sorts. she’s now taking iGCSEs early and some in cohort year the flexibility really works for her.
For a 6 year old I would focus on maths & English skills then just follow her lead and facilitate what she’s interested in plus add in some sports or arts social things. Your be suprised how much they learn with little “formal” learning. The £2 tuition hub has primary level lessons which are cheap to try out. Loads on YouTube too. Good luck.