Autism - Charles and me

Chapter Eight Lessons  Charles loved learning new things and was always enthusiastic about going to school. He embraced most subjects he took, including history, science, math, cooking, music, drama and geography were just a few. He even enjoyed French and Spanish but as the work got harder he fell behind so he had to give these subjects up. He had one-to-one in certain key subjects, especially if they were practical lessons, science being one of them. He would get so excited about experiments and without listening fully to instructions would start messing with the Bunsen burner and mixing chemicals. This obviously worried the staff in case he set fire to the room. At one stage they said they may have to consider taking him out of science, but once Mrs Allen, his class room assistant, had had a word with him the school gave him another chance. It was the same with cooking; he’d become so excited about the lesson and wanted to add his own ingredients to recipes or pick som

HAPPY CARD Charles made a card for me and said that it was called a happy card. On the front were the words, ‘I love you mommy,’ and on the back there were several empty lines where he said I could write down what was making me sad. Then when I had finished I could give the happy card  back to him and then he’d give me a big hug and all my worries would be gone. J

Chapter seven SENIOR SCHOOL When Charles was leaving primary school I was given two appropriate schools to look at. The first one I didn’t like the look of and the second, even though it was well suited it would have been a round trip of over two hundred miles a week traveling for him, so I decided against it. I wanted him to be able to get to know the people and area where we lived as we had only been here twelve months. So at the last minute I looked at our local schools and my instincts lead me to a school less than a mile away from our house. They did cater for autism but not on a large scale. Well, I looked round, spoke to the staff, got outside help and decided to give it a go. This is a letter I sent to his head teacher at his primary school just six months later! 29 th November 2010 Dear Mr Tuft I know it’s been a while but we did talk briefly about me letting you know about Charles’s transition, so here it is.  Things started off okay and I was under no ill