I have homeschooled Mr. C since removing him from pre-school after his negative experiences there. I have always tried to modify his academics towards his personal interests, such as learning to count using construction machines and fire trucks, and reading was done with books on cars, and transformers. I taught him about charts, compiling and comparing data with Lego Bionicle pieces.
However I will admit I never took his specific unique neurostructure into account when creating his homeschooling plan. What I mean by this is that I would have him do a certain amount of work for each subject each day, because I never thought of altering that. Slowly as more subjects have been added, I’ve watched as he’s tried harder and harder to just “get through” each of them. We’ve spoken about it, and it always comes backs to feeling overwhelmed by the number of subjects he’s to learn. He says that when he’s struggling to learn one thing, he worries about the time it’ll take because of still needing to complete other subjects, and that when he’s enjoying a lesson he can’t just keep going and learning more about it.
Now I know one option would be to lower the amount of subjects he’s to learn, but I know he’s capable and I feel that each of those subjects are important. So while watching Mr.N sleep the other night and wondering what he was thinking of, I started to think about how he and his brother focus on specific subjects for extended periods of time. Then it hit me, what about making Mr. C’s homeschooling more in tune with how his brain naturally works. If I lower the amount of subjects per day to just two, but increase the amount of time we spend on each of them he’d be able to get really in depth about each subject and truly master each concept and lesson we learned. It would work with his natural tendency to dive right into a subject of interest as deep as he wanted, so that he really absorbed everything he could about it.
I spoke with him, and he loves the idea of changing our homeschooling schedule to this new concept. I think that by working with his natural tendency to really immerse himself in one subject at a time for long periods of time instead of against it by having him do a little of several subjects each day that he’ll not only enjoy the academic portions of his day more, but he’ll also retain and comprehend more of them. I feel this different method will actually allow for him to learn even more than he was with our previous method, and that is the core of what homeschooling is about to me: Tailoring it to ensure he learns as much as he can in ways that work with him.
Behind starburst eyes 
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