Autism Home Learning

Essential to wellbeing is being able to socially connect with others. This is no different for autistic children and young people, except that being social from their perspective may be different to ours. This post explores 'being social' from an autistic perspective and ways to create opportunities for being social during this period of lockdown. Promoting Good Feelings when Home Learning (3) Today's post focuses upon relationships as an essential component of wellbeing.  Mutually supportive and enjoyable relationships are essential for wellbeing. Our successful relationships promote a sense of belonging and self-worth, providing opportunities to share experiences and support emotional wellbeing. There are many myths regarding autism, none more so than an assumption that autistic people have poor relationships and do not want to be social, yet many do have positive relationships and enjoy being social - they just do these things differently!   We need to guar

Key to the success of new learning opportunities is STRUCTURE. Today's post builds on yesterday's & suggests tip to structure learning activities so your child is successful.  Home learning provides opportunities for your son or daughter to learn about new topics, learn in new contexts (home, garden, kitchen...) and to gain satisfaction when they are successful. We know that learning contributes to wellbeing, but for autistic children and young people learning activities may need specific types of structure for them to succeed and enjoy. Yesterday's post suggested ways to include new learning activities on the daily schedule. Today's post considers ways to organise the learning activity to make it meaningful for your son or daughter and to support them to succeed.  Many of our children have trouble organising themselves and their activities. Whilst the daily schedule shows what activity is next, they may then need some additional structure to help them to org

Today's post focuses on an important step to wellbeing - keep learning!  My first post on wellbeing emphasised the importance of identifying activities that give your son or daughter 'good feelings' and also their strengths, skills and interests. Yesterday's post referred to Caroline Smith's acronym CARES which you can read more about here:  Wellbeing - CARES .  I suggested ways you might provide opportunities for your son or daughter to have some control of their activities and to make choices. By adding 'good feelings' activities to the home learning day, and finding ways for your child to have some control and make choices, we can promote their wellbeing and happiness.  Promoting Good Feelings when Home Learning (2) Today the focus turns to another essential element of wellbeing and that is the importance of learning . The CARES idea includes learning in relation to:  Access & opportunity - to try new activities which your child may l