HOME SCHOOLING? What time of day do you teach the lessons?

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I home school both my children almost 12 and 13, grade 6 and 8 and I have done for the last 3 years. I am curious if any parents that home school have tried having their lessons in the evening instead of daytime.

I have been doing a lot of research on sleeping issues with AS as my son has that and I'm not sure if he has ADHD but bacisally he cannot remember much of what is discussed. He told me that unless it was something that really interested him he does not retain it. He takes Melatonin every night as without it he would not go to sleep but I had read an article that said it could be that the Melatonin was being produced at the wrong time of day i.e. during daylight hours instead of evening time. According to the article and several others I read when it is produced during the daytime in interfers with the levels of dopamine in the brain and it is hard to shift focus onto something when needed.

Long story short... I decided to try teaching for a trial period in the evening to see if he has more attention based on the assumption that he is not producing Melatonin naturally when he should, so in theory it should not be present perhaps in the evening.

We seemed to have had a successful first evening and he felt more alert. I did read another thread but can't find it now in were a home school parent would give her older AS son a list of what he needed to do and he worked late at night successfully on his academics as he could not sleep. However I will track our progress over the next few weeks to see if there is an overall benefit.

Any comments from others who may have tried this I would appreciate.

I do know that some NT homeschoolers do this type of thing due to work schedules. This is great if it works and you have the energy and clear mind to teach at that time of day. That would be my problem.

Oh, i hadn't seen your topic
I started homeschooling after the winter holidays , and this rythm came naturally to my son and I, we both are AS, both have trouble falling asleep. In the beginning i tried keeping up with school hours, putting the alarm clock at 8 and starting lessons at 9. After a few days this started to shift naturally, and i just stopped setting my alarm. My son naturally falls asleep around 11:30-midnight, so we wake up at 10, because that's the only way he will be rested enough... then i let him be in the morning, waking up at his pace and having breakfast and playing, we only start the lessons in the afternooon now. It actually works better, and as i'm also useless until i have at least a liter of coffee running through my veins, i'm also more focused in the afternoon and less likely to get irritated if i have to repeat the same thing 10 times, as happens with grammar (yes, words have names like "pronouns and verbs " , no it doesn't change what they mean, ok i will explain once more.....).
I've found we work quicker this way and actually spend less time doing academics, since what we used to do in an hour can now be done in 30-45 minutes, and he remembers it the next day.So we're done by dinner time, and before going to bed i will read to him his biology lesson as if it was a cool story, he seems to enjoy it and retains everything from it, the next day we do the exercises that come with it without having to read it again. I'm also flexible with the setting of some lessons, for example he will remember his multiplication tables better if he repeats them while jumping on the trampoline, so i figured, whatever works!
Tell me a bit more about the way you guys work, and if you have success with the different schedule, i found it easier to manage personally.

It's great to hear your schedule! My kids go to bed at 11pm usually and the same I wake them about 10am. I tried doing the regular school start time but that never worked sucessfully but even when teaching during the morning or early afternoon my son would not be focused at all, quite often wanting to lay down or put his head down (they complained about the same thing when he was in school). What has also affected our school hours is my trying to do part time work for a portion of the time during the week as I'm a single mom. More recently since January some things have changed for me that has allowed me to try the evenings to see if there is a benefit and boy is there. My son comes right away when asked to do school work, even if he's on his PC or game system, he's focused and making comments on how valid he thinks things are which he never did before.

How does your son view school work in general? My son is grade 8 but has always struggled with how valid doing school work in general is, which I realize most kids do but I'm wondering if with AS it is more tied in with how logical something is and whether or not it should be done. I had the same issues at school myself. It's like he does not understand the concept of following through to be able to graduate... not sure if I'm explaining this properly!? My daughter gets that she has to do it in order to graduate but then he gets mad at her for understanding these concepts. I could go on...

I appreciate your comments. I'm going to stick with this later time of day too as it seems to be much better for all of us and I seem more focused. It must be an Aspie thing as it's usually the reverse for NT children as far as I know.

Oh the idea of schoolwork itself...he is getting into it, because he's 9 and still has trouble reading, as i said somewhere else, he spent the first years of his "school life" in holland, so french phonemes are well, foreign to him still, but he's getting better at it . It would be quicker if he did his youtube and game playthrough (and hack.....) searches in french, but he does them in english since "french people just sound weird" , so he learns how to read and type in english instead, and has no motivation for learning french...
Strangely enough, he has gotten into funny japanese tv shows for a little while now, and can say some simple japanese sentences (the power of repetition and echolalia is strong ), but i'm not an NT....so i view things differently. I think his interests will guide him anyway, there is no forcing him to get interested in grammar or even understand the concept, so i just "force him through" the grammar lessons, and try to make fact related lessons such as biology, science, history and geography as interesting as possible.
When children are so young, what the school system does is give them a little bit of every possible subject to enlarge their general culture and let kids be able to pick what they prefer and are good at, and in high school they start specializing into that. So, if your child has already figured out what his strong subjects are and what he likes to study, why not encourage that, since after all, nobody who is passionate about geology at age 15 will just drop science related subjects and start getting only grammar lessons, to become an english teacher....That's just how it works. I think it will be easier for our kids if we fuel their interests instead of insisting they drop it for a subject they don't enjoy learning .
All that with a measure of course, you need to be able to read and write properly even if all you care about is chemistry , but i'd draw the line at forcing a child like that to write top notch essays just so he can get good grades in something he will probably not use later i life.
So, we still argue about the validity of some things, as in "why do i have to learn that "you" is a subject, i thought it was a freaking pronoun, and now it's changing names, i know what "you" means, it means YOU, i can use it in a sentence if you want? oh my i just did it, i'm a genius!! !" (cue incoming meltown.) And in fact, i don't know how to defend the usefulness of this, because i don't see it, except: "you need to know it so that you get good grades if you are tested on it." which is ridiculous and not a valid goal in life. But i still push it

AS mom & Ediself:

I don't know if it would help or not, but sometimes we just stress the "you have to do it this way because it's a rule" concept. Since my kid is (fairly) black and white, we occasionally go in that direction. Sometimes we also have conversations such as:

J: I don't care about....fill in the blank - English, whatever.
Me: Well, maybe not, but the State requires that I teach it.

With that, I usually get a frown, but he carries on with the work.

Yeah, concepts about the importance of graduating high school would not carry much weight with him right now!!

I agree and I have take the line many times regarding the government setting the learning outcomes, over and over and over, I was curious to find if other parents were facing the same black and white thinking from their children which to me seems to be driven more by logic than just not wanting to do the work as such.

The focusing on interests is the best way to go, I got a great essay on a comparision between Nintendo Wii and XBOX 360 game consoles tonight and the whole time of day thing is really working as he's alert and on task, wish I had tried it awhile ago, still we are getting there.

I also found out that he can elect to not do the grade 10,11 and 12 exams which would have meant him going into a strange school building and trying to cope with that. He will still graduate though so I think that has come as a relief to him.

Do you have such options in the US to bypass exams or what would you do?

Thanks for the input.

I'm in france, so no, the exams will happen in a strange unknown high school. That's not before another 11 years though We do have a little exam kids pass at 15 years old but i never got it, i missed the beginning of it, came in without having studied and just generally didn't give a rat's ass about it, because it means nothing once you got your bachelor's degree...so he will go if he's motivated enough.

Do you have such options in the US to bypass exams or what would you do?

It depends on each individual state. We live in NY, with lots of regulations. Homeschoolers are required to take end-of-the-year exams every other year until 7th grade - on alternate years, a portfolio of their work is offered instead. Starting in 7th, they have to have exams each year.

We are currently in the process of figuring this out with the school. Under his current designation, do the same rules apply? (I think so). What about a special ed. designation? Because if he's not exempt, there may be significant meltdowns and weeping and gnashing of teeth for two or three days every June!! !! !

The way we have it here now the exams are grade 10-12 and count for 20% of your overall mark each year. They are giving kids the option to elect not to do the exams and for go the possible additional marks. I take it this would only apply to special ed. students which we are as I haven't heard anything else offered to other students.

You can graduate with a certificate stating you have completed all the government outlined curriculum, assuming you have which may not always be the case depending on the child.

It gives a few options as my only concern is how my son or daughter would deal with being in a strange building and an increase in their anxiety levels, however with maturity hopefully that might change.

Do you have such options in the US to bypass exams or what would you do?

I live in Montana and we don't have to do any testing for homeschooling. The district requires a written letter of intent and that we understand what we are doing, however I did NOT write that letter because he has been in the public school system and I filled out the paper at the end of the year and marked "not returning to school". That and I have had IEP's for 2 years and the school he attended KNEW that he wasn't coming back. We still have a great relationship with that school.

As long as I have attendance records that show he attended school that day or not that can be shown to an official upon request I'm all good. Technically I haven't even done that. I have work recorded, but not attendance, because I feel everything is a learning experience (good or bad) and he's "in school" all the time.

Shoot, man!! I'm moving to Montana!! !!:wink: