Homeschooling the Child with Asperger Syndrome Review

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(More customer reviews)It is hard to believe Lise Pyles packed so much into such a thin little book. She expertly balances the personalized POV of a mother who homeschooled her Asperger-affected son for several years with the POV of a self-taught expert on raising kids with Asperger's. The book itself has a very conversational and personal style, sympathetic to the parent's concerns without ever being patronizing.
The book is not comprehensive about any one particular topic, but gives practical and diverse starting-off points for many issues facing AS-affected homeschooling families, including tackling the mindset of teaching the "whole child" instead of just academics, how to choreograph tailored social opportunities for all ages and gauge their successes, childhoood depression vs. AS kids' real need for decompression and heaps of alone-time, how to keep a proper perspective and avoid burnout, how to model social skills in everyday situations, the concept of "learning styles" through the lens of Asperger's and how AS kids employ them in slightly different ways, lists of practical life-skills and social skills at various age and developmental levels, special issues to consider when homeschooling an AS child, lists of web sites that help with teaching face recognition/ idiom use/ communication/ "sensory diets," brief curriculum reviews, and many other subjects.
Again, it is amazing that so much information was successfully packed into such a slim volume. The author achieves this by employing the frequent use of well-organized and well-conceived bullet point lists, and the nearly dozen appendixes are a wealth of AS-specific information not just for American homeschoolers but for families in Australia, the UK and Canada as well.
Aside from the concise and robustly practical nature of the information in this book, what I found most helpful is the positive and upbeat point of view of Pyles herself. In every chapter, she includes real-life success stories, including her own as well as that of 40 other AS-affected homeschooling families. But the real boon of these is that she gradually redefines what "success" really means - not the best grades or the most awards or anything like that, but that even things that look like "failures" on the outset can be viewed as successes with just a slight attitude shift. For example: A trip to the museum that ends in a meltdown after an hour. The meltdown might be perceived as a failure at first, but the fact that a sensory-sensitive child survived an hour at a noisy, confusing museum is a success. Nuggets like this are peppered throughout the book. I suppose she is "modeling" what it looks like to turn lemons into lemonade. =)
This book has changed my entire perspective on raising and educating an Asperger-affected child entirely at home, 100% for the better and with great heaps of optimism. I am now going to order her other books, and hope that she knows how much her work has helped people.

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Packed with inspiring ideas and tips that can be used with any curriculum and on any budget, Homeschooling the Child with Asperger Syndrome explains how to design a varied study programme built around the child's own interests, making use of simple material as well as computers and on-line resources. Parents planning to homeschool their child with Asperger Syndrome will appreciate Lise Pyles' encouraging and practical advice, including step-by-step instructions on how to assess and improve body language and social skills, accommodating the child's need for ritual or perfectionist tendencies, and how to develop handwriting and coordination skills.

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