Thread by @edsouthall

Tiny personal thread.
My 10 year old son has high functioning autism. Home schooling has been pretty straight forward for almost every single thing we've done with him with one very profound exception...

He intensly dislikes anything related to English (or other subjects, but it manifests mostly in English) that requires him to use imagination without scaffold. Completely shuts down on it, refuses to do anything. Any pushing to do it causes an argument.

oops [intensely].
I've really struggled with this. Offering some scaffold hasn't really helped either. So things like 'write a narrative from the perspective of...' or 'write a diary entry as a...' or even 'write a poem' causes him real anxiety... until today!

Today I tried something different and we used a set of dice to help him make decisions about things instead of trying to make things up and decide upon what's "right" just from his imagination alone.

So for example 'are you a boy or a girl in this story' would just get "i dont know" and a bit of a shut down. Whereas now it's "even numbers you're writing from the perspective of a girl, odd it's a boy". He *loves* it.
How old are you in this story?
"i dont know"
sum 2 dice...

Where did you live? 6 choices, roll a die

etc.

I'm so happy! Today is a good day for us both.
[/thread]

A whole page! From refusing to write a single word to this. 🥳. The dots in the second image highlight where we used dice to make decisions.