Homeschooling a Child with Autism
Incorporating Household Chores into the Homeschooling Program
Homeschoolers of autistic children, who lead hectic lives, often relegate the performance of household chores to the bottom of the list of their priorities. They are too busy formulating and/or implementing a homeschooling program. What they fail to realize is that doing household chores can provide a wealth of hands-on learning opportunities for their children with autism, thus lending variety and relevance to their homeschooling program.
By matching the appropriate chores to the ages and functioning levels of their autistic children, caregivers can help the latter to acquire important skills for daily living. Moreover, the interactive, hands-on nature of household chores can provide a concrete and contextualized way of teaching autistic children who have difficulties with abstract learning.
Here are some of the ways that household chores can enhance the quality of the homeschooling program of autistic children.
Cultivates Self-Care Skills
Performing household chores such as doing their laundry, dishwashing and cooking can enable autistic children to acquire higher-level self-care skills. In other words, these children are learning to do things that contribute directly to their basic well-being. Instead of relying on their caregivers to cater to all their basic needs, they will be able to take on some of these responsibilities. This is an integral part of their development into responsible and empowered adults.
Develops Fine Motor and Motor Planning Skills
Some autistic children have poor fine motor skills that prevent them from following a sequence of steps to complete a simple task. As a result, they are likely to make a mess, or take too long to perform household tasks. Thus, it is understandable that caregivers often consider it a hassle to involve their children in household chores.
However, by breaking down the chore into a series of smaller tasks and matching their children’s proficiency to the tasks, caregivers can help to develop their children’s fine motor skills. Through daily practice under caregiver guidance, these children will be able to hone their fine motor skills in these areas.
Over time, their exposure to and experience with a variety of household chores requiring the implementation of multiple tasks will enable to them to develop a repertoire of skills. Their growing experience may also lead some to improve their motor planning ability, i.e. performing a new task from conception to execution.
Offers Preparation for Vocational Training
Teaching autistic children how to perform household chores can also be considered a precursor to preparation for future vocational training. Many basic vocations consist of the implementation of a series of steps. In the same way, autistic children who have been exposed to this type of instruction will be more amenable to this sort of training in the future.
Provides Content for Literacy Development
The performance of household tasks can also be transformed into writing templates to build literacy skills, by depicting the experience in a story format, or a series of procedures/steps that are accompanied by photos of the autistic child in action. For autistic children who struggle with the abstract nature of written work, these writing tasks will have meaning, relevance and familiarity. The “doing of” and “writing about” the household chores can be mutually reinforcing in bolstering these children’s performance of these tasks.
Therefore, homeschoolers should take advantage of household chores to cultivate the self-care, fine motor and motor planning skills of their autistic children, as well as prepare them for future vocational training. Moreover, the conversion of these "live" experiences into writing activities can also help to develop their children's literacy skills.
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