Advice from parents of young people with ASD/ASC

[Wilbedon]

Hello,
My lovely DS1 is in year 7 at our local comprehensive school. He was diagnosed with ASD when he was 5.

DS has difficulties with the processing and retention of information, as well as anxiety. He is struggling with completing his homework. In order to help him to complete an essay for his history teacher I have shown him lots of websites with the relevant information. I have talked through some of the points that he could potentially make in the essay. I have made notes from various websites to help him. He still says that he has no idea how to do it.

I want to help and support him without doing his homework for him. Ultimately, I want him to get enough passes at GCSE to allow him to access some post 16 education or training. Dictating his homework to him word by word will not help him to achieve this.

We had a telephone parents' evening recently that allowed us to speak to his form tutor. I asked her for advice about helping him with homework. She said that she would rather he had help than struggle and not do it. However, I just end up literally doing his work for him.

Does anyone have any suggestions or strategies that have worked with their young people to assist with homework without doing it for them?

Thank you

Talk to his History teacher and ask for more advice about how she wants him to structure his answers.
Don't panic about GCSEs etc. yet.
A lot of secondary is about learning how to structure your answers, how to write essays. To be honest I wouldn't have known how to do this, and if your DS has perfectionist tendencies then getting something on blank paper can be overwhelming. Writing on a computer can help as its easy to just dump stuff and then restructure it.
But you really need to approach the individual subject teachers. (You can usually phone the school and leave a message if you don't have their email address.)
Having a parent who is supportive and asking for advice on how to get their child do their homework is usually appreciated.

My daughter is in Y8 and has a language disorder, suffers mostly with expressive language so this is a problem and a lot of ASC have similar difficulties.
We have found the most helpful thing has been scaffolding. Have you tried sentence starters and word banks?
You can print off some sentence starters and history key words he needs to include as well as key events. He can move these around and decide where to place them in the paragraphs.
He is still very young and lots of kids in Y7 need this level of support and then are able to be independent.
I have lots of resources if you want to PM me.

Writing an essay at y7 is hard.
Ideally he needs to get something down that he can submit.
I would encourage him to try and answer the question (doesn't matter whether he is right) and write down a few facts or ideas he remembers from his history lesson.
Don't make too big a deal of it. Get it submitted and then email his history teacher.

Essay writing is a very specific skill and will probably need to be taught as such. Whilst being shown websites and being given ideas of things to include in an essay is brilliant, if your DS isn't already familiar with how to make notes or how to choose the most important information, it will be hard for him to turn those things into an essay.

If you have time, it might be that supporting him to use PEE or PEEL would be a useful starting point. There are a couple of colour-coded examples on this page. It's a way of helping to structure paragraphs and although your DS may end up with a fairly stilted essay, it will give him an opportunity to demonstrate what he knows. Using a writing frame is one way forward or you could try different colour post-its and let him dictate to you e.g. the first point goes on yellow, he dictates a sentence or two of evidence for you to write on pink, explanation goes on green etc. He could then type/write up the paragraphs to submit but your role will have been to help him organise his information and thoughts rather than to do it for him.

If he has issues processing the information and putting it down on paper he might benefit from some professional help from a specialised SEN tutor. Is this something you can afford? What about the SENCO at the school? Does he get much input from them?

If you don't have any tailored help available I would help him by first putting a lot of the structure in place for him. The idea of writing an entire essay can be daunting without any SEN.

Perhaps break it down into small sections. So that really he's just answering a set of questions but presenting it as a large block of writing. Keep putting in stepping stones for him until he's able to do it. The more practise he gets the more you'll be able to put the stepping stones further apart until he's doing it unsupported. Don't worry if at first you're giving him a lot of support.

You can get templates available online specifically to help children with SEN with their essay writing so that might be something to research too.

Hi OP. You're absolutely right that he's not going to learn how to do the work if you're doing most of it for him. It will only mask his difficulties and allow the teachers to get away with ignoring them rather than addressing them. The first step would probably be to contact the SENCO. Get things on paper, e-mail your concerns and push for an action plan. My DS had similar problems but wasn't diagnosed with ASD until the beginning of year 10 by which time it was too late and he did really badly in his humanities GCSEs, though fortunately he was strong enough in maths and science to progress to sixth form. I found I couldn't help him at home much of the time because a lot of the information needed to complete the homework was presented verbally in class and he couldn't listen and write at the same time. If your DS is having similar difficulties in class he will likely need adjustments made in school, it's not something you can easily fix from home.

I'm watching your thread as I could have written it myself.... 'processing and retention of information, as well as anxiety ' - that's my yr 8 son too. Our EP in yr 5 told me that the biggest challenge he would face in his secondary education was his anxiety & I'm so very mindful of it

Secondary has been a big change and the 2 hurdles we keep coming across are

1. 'revise' a topic for a test next week
2. write an essay

DS thinks revising is flicking though his (illegible) work and that writing an essay is regurgitation of his (illegible) work. I haven't stepped in yet but I'm building up to it & formulating a plan.

Thinking back to my own comprehensive experience, I floundered for three years then realised I needed a strategy and bought a book called 'Passing Exams Without Anxiety' by David Acres which was brilliant. It explained how to revise - how to break a topic down into headings, subheadings etc using mind maps and then making index cards (remember them? - no idea if kids these days use them). So I'm going to try that with him. I'm also going to google 'how to revise' in case times have changed

I've also found it quite useful to buy the textbook they use in school for a couple of subjects (History being one of them) so I've got a copy as home as the KS3 stuff is all standard stuff.

Creation of mind maps/index cards is active revision involving summarising the important stuff. DS finds this more difficult to recall than some of the detail... a bit like not being able to see the wood for the trees. It's so much more effective than passively reading your classwork, especially if you struggle to retain info. And once you've got that Mind Map or Index Card with all the headings & subheadings in place for a topic with a few notes underneath you've got the essay there once you combine it with the PEE approach

One of our first yr 7 topics and essays was 1066 & the Norman Conquest..... 'Who do you think should be the next King of England' and this topic is really well suited to the approach above
A good mind map of the key info with the key players and their pros & cons gives your your essay right there.

I so wish these skills and techniques were properly taught early on in secondary and teachers didn't just assume kids have them. Even adults struggle

EP also suggested the use of a dictaphone to record homework instructions. Like Prestel mentioned above, much of the verbal homework info just doesn't make it into DS's planner and is long forgotten by the time he gets home

Thank you so much for all of your replies. I really appreciate all of your suggestions.

I believe that DS1 is far more complicated than his teachers have ever acknowledged. He was born with medical problems that are linked to learning difficulties, but when I brought it up with the SENCO at his primary school he said that he did not believe that DS has an learning difficulties. His paediatrician told me that I needed to speak to his school when I asked her about it. The SENCO at the secondary school just tells me that there are lot of pupils who are struggling more than DS. DS has very rarely reached an age related expectation in his whole school career.

I have broken the essay down into chunks, so that he needs to write one paragraph about each heading. I have also written him a plan to follow to help him structure each paragraph. He is doing really well so far because he has at least written a couple of paragraphs. He was struggling to write more than a sentence in lockdown.

He had a tutor from year 2 to year 5, but she stopped coming when he refused to engage with her. She was lovely, and did her best with him, but there was not much more she could do. He has developed a lot of strategies to both hide his difficulties and to get out of doing any work.

I try to think about his future and GCSEs as a way of focussing my own energies on what is most important, and what will help him the most. I always want to swoop in and rescue him when he is struggling, but thinking about the 15 year old he will soon be, and what is best for that young man helps me to step back a bit and try to support DS in a more long term way.

Thank you so much everyone, I am so pleased to have received so many replies and suggestions.

Essay writing is not taught well in primary school. (No criticism of teachers, they don't have enough time and it's very much a one-size approach fits all). It is also barely practised. My DD used to write approx 2 essays per term. That's six per year. It's not enough to get the skill truly sorted. You need to be doing an essay a week for a number of years to really get it properly with plenty of encouraging feedback and pointers about how to improve.

When my DD tried for the 11+ and we started tutoring one year before, she could barely string a sentence together and had no idea what was wanted. Your DS, if he has problems, it is not his fault.

With most ASD kids I've noticed that if they have a pattern they can follow it will eventually click. Don't give up. After six months my DD was whizzing essays out and doing really well. But it took her that long of a weekly essay every week and really putting effort in at the start to get the hang of it.

He will get it and it will boost his confidence tremendously once he does get it and can start to do well. Feel for you as a Mum as I know it's SO hard to keep giving and giving and giving and hoping and hoping and hoping. But keep supporting him and explaining and giving examples, it will click. Good luck.

Essay writing is something that most secondary teachers expect to be teaching.