Homeschool’s not a real option for Charlie. Jim and I have quite flexible work/teaching hours, but it’s not really possible for either of us to be home full-time. Without having any sort of sturctured, official, program, Charlie has picked up some new skills this summer with us, including typing independently on the computer.

Granted, he’s not typing sentences or phrases. He’s been typing the names of old PBS kids shows (the ones that were sort of new when he was 2 years old in 1999) into the Search box, using the space bar and pressing Enter. He’s got a very few words down (we’re talking single digits) and just nouns and one adjective. My newest word for him is “youtube.com”.

Charlie’s never shown such interest in typing. At school, they’ve used programs like Type to Learn to try to teach him, but that went nowhere. He’s done some typing with one finger using a word processing program. But I susepect that he feels distinctly undermotivated to do this exercise---whereas, typing words of things he likes into the YouTube Search engine gets him ........videos.

It remains to be seen how to extend these first typing lessons. Jim and I are just happy to see Charlie using a keyboard. One of the words he types is “school” and after I’d dictated s and c, Charlie knew the rest, most likely because that’s a word he’s seen and heard a gazillion times over----which suggests to me, while he still does not seem able to read, he has been absorbing something. At school, things are much more regulated, as far as having data sheets and progress reports to fill out, and then there’s there all the other children and adults in his room, not to mention bells ringing and timers going off and crying and noises. All things Charlie, much less anyone, can control, completely, while homelife can be set up to be as accommodating to Charlie and his sensitivities as possible.

My friend Emily posted recently about her son’s third-grade experience so far, and all the difficulty of navigating the minutiae of directions and interactions of a school day and I thought of how many things must happen around Charlie that he is flummoxed by, and he has such limited resources for expressing what he’s thinking. It all makes me see why homeschool is not only an option, but a necessity for some families with kids on the spectrum. 

Our school district provides “parent training” sessions to families, in the form of home visits from teachers, but perhaps the training needs to go both ways---perhaps “school” could benefit from some “home” training?