My ASD Child

“I need some advice on what academic curriculum would best fit a home-schooled child (6 y.o.) with Asperger syndrome. We had a bad year last year in regular school, and I’ve vowed to pull him out of the mainstream and start homeschooling after summer break. Please help!” The curriculum content for a child with Asperger’s or High Functioning Autism should be decided based on long-term goals, so that the utility of each item is evaluated in terms of its long-term benefits for the child’s socialization skills, vocational potential, and quality of life. Emphasis should be placed on skills that correspond to relative strengths for your child as well as skills that may be viewed as central for his future vocational life (e.g., writing skills, computer skills, science, etc.). If your child has an area of special interest that is not so unusual that it would prohibit him from using it for possible future employment, such an interest should be cultivated in a systematic fashion (e.g.

Children with Asperger’s and High Functioning Autism (HFA) often exhibit different forms of challenging behavior. It's imperative that these behaviors are not seen as willful or malicious; more accurately, they should be viewed as connected to the child’s disorder. Parents and teachers need to recognize the difficulties that the youngster on the autism spectrum brings to each situation as a result of his or her neurologically-based disorder. In this post, we will discuss the following: Symptoms that cause behavioral problems   Instructional intervention Positive reinforcement  Negative reinforcement Supportive intervention   Sticking to a routine Encouraging the child’s special interest Issuing rewards for positive behavior  Using visual schedules Click here for the full article...

Most children with Asperger’s and HFA are not loners by choice, and there is a tendency (as these young people develop towards adolescence) for despondency, negativism, and depression as a result of the child's increasing awareness of personal inadequacy in social situations and repeated experiences of failure to make and/or maintain relationships. In this post, we will discuss the following: teaching your child to monitor her or his own speech style helping your child to recognize and use a range of different means to disagree, discuss, interact, mediate, negotiate, and persuade through verbal means helping him or her to develop the ability to anticipate multiple outcomes, to explain motivation, to make inferences, and to predict managing social situations how to interpret other people's social behavior training of the child's expressive skills Click here for the full article...