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Hello :-)

everso

Hello there

I'm mum to four young boys, the eldest (8) has mild aspergers, our next-in-line (6) has traits of aspergers and one of our youngest (4) has a more severe form of aspergers and consequently receives DLA and NHS speech therapy support.  He has just completed his "early bird intervention" course with Autism Outreach.  We won't know about our youngest (2) until he is a little bit older and the symptoms might/might not fully present themselves.

We homeschool all 4 boys, with the support of the local authority homeschooling dept. and Autism Outreach - but in the early days, before the diagnosis and all the ensuing help - I was grateful for forums like this one, and the autism blogs out there, for advice and encouragement.

Looking forward to meeting with other families dealing with autism Smile

-everso

Parents

  • Hello there :)

    Apologies for the late reply - busy week! :)  I shall try and be as open and helpful as I can.

    Sadly, we get absolutely no funding for the academic side of the homeschooling for our older two children.  A few people have mentioned possible funding, but I've not heard of anyone successfully getting this yet.  If they are worried about people just spending the money on holidays or such, I wouldn't mind if the funds came in the form of vouchers that could only be spent on school stuff!

    We homeschooled happily "off radar" entirely on our own for years until our 3rd son needed professional support - which brought our family into contact with a whole team of LA and NHS specialists.  This was pretty bewildering when we were used to it just being us.

    We have been supported as homeschoolers with autism specialists (home school support worker, special needs education support, autism outreach staff, educational psychologist, speech therapist) coming to our house, where they would normally visit a child in nursery.  Between them have provided us hours of advice, lessons for our son and also with a few resources, mainly speech therapy worksheets, sign language sets etc.

    However, our son has gone from being utterly locked into his own world, stimming and unresponsive at age 3 to a happy, joining-in 4 and a half year old, so this support is now going to consist of speech therapy only as we start to officially homeschool him in a few months at age 5.

    I had many sleepless nights worrying after hearing horror stories about how homeschoolers can be treated, but we lucked out - the LA has been really supportive of our choice.  Apparantly we're the first in our area to HS an autistic child from the start (rather than after something has gone wrong with state schooling) - so we've been called something of a test case - and in return I'm trying to be really open and welcoming with the LA, so that they can see how well HS can work for aspergers children.  It definitely helped to have two older boys that they could see were thriving, both academically and socially.

    I completely agree with your remarks on knowing your rights.  Very occassionally I've come across LA staff who have been cautious about homeschooling and very pro-special schools for autism and whilst I'm working to change their opinion :) it's reassuring to know that you know your child better than anyone and it's your choice, not theirs.

    kind regards

    everso

Reply

  • Hello there :)

    Apologies for the late reply - busy week! :)  I shall try and be as open and helpful as I can.

    Sadly, we get absolutely no funding for the academic side of the homeschooling for our older two children.  A few people have mentioned possible funding, but I've not heard of anyone successfully getting this yet.  If they are worried about people just spending the money on holidays or such, I wouldn't mind if the funds came in the form of vouchers that could only be spent on school stuff!

    We homeschooled happily "off radar" entirely on our own for years until our 3rd son needed professional support - which brought our family into contact with a whole team of LA and NHS specialists.  This was pretty bewildering when we were used to it just being us.

    We have been supported as homeschoolers with autism specialists (home school support worker, special needs education support, autism outreach staff, educational psychologist, speech therapist) coming to our house, where they would normally visit a child in nursery.  Between them have provided us hours of advice, lessons for our son and also with a few resources, mainly speech therapy worksheets, sign language sets etc.

    However, our son has gone from being utterly locked into his own world, stimming and unresponsive at age 3 to a happy, joining-in 4 and a half year old, so this support is now going to consist of speech therapy only as we start to officially homeschool him in a few months at age 5.

    I had many sleepless nights worrying after hearing horror stories about how homeschoolers can be treated, but we lucked out - the LA has been really supportive of our choice.  Apparantly we're the first in our area to HS an autistic child from the start (rather than after something has gone wrong with state schooling) - so we've been called something of a test case - and in return I'm trying to be really open and welcoming with the LA, so that they can see how well HS can work for aspergers children.  It definitely helped to have two older boys that they could see were thriving, both academically and socially.

    I completely agree with your remarks on knowing your rights.  Very occassionally I've come across LA staff who have been cautious about homeschooling and very pro-special schools for autism and whilst I'm working to change their opinion :) it's reassuring to know that you know your child better than anyone and it's your choice, not theirs.

    kind regards

    everso

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