Pictionary, anyone?

Ever play Pictionary? It's like a cross between charades and doodling -- you have to DRAW your clue and the other team has to guess what you mean. It's frustrating, confusing, often unintelligible, and sometimes pretty funny. Other times, everyone gets really annoyed and stomps off in a huff. "That's the Grand Canyon?! That looks NOTHING like the Grand Canyon! You're such an IDIOT!"

This, dear readers, is what it's like to teach an autistic child. If you can't teach it using charades, you add a doodle pad. If that doesn't work, add picture books, songs, posters, and lots of hands-on demonstrations. If that doesn't work, just admit defeat and go on before everyone gets in a huff and stomps off. I mean, really, who can demonstrate profit margin with a Pictionary pad? Especially when the student doesn't understand money.

Teaching seed germination is pretty easy. Plant 12 seeds and dig up a couple of seeds every day for a week. Voila! Add a digital microscope, take some pictures, and you're good to go. Teaching force/work? It's possible, if you get the cat to push things off a table. The cat applies a push (force), friction pushes back (force), and finally it moves (work) and gravity pulls it to the ground (force). Add a summary poster, and you may just have it.

American government? Not so much. Gross national product? No. But even ancient history is possible if you have enough picture books and crafts, and you stick to every day life in history, not kings and wars. We made bendy-straw papyrus boats, and floated them in the big bathtub, singing "Gonna float my boat/Down the Nile River!" Good times... :)

This year? Well, I bought Calvert School's 4th grade for The Boy. I figured I could just bring The Girl along for the ride on science and social studies, and we'd be in like Flint. (Or is it Flynn?)

Science is basically the same material we learned last year. They just added more vocabulary and left out the easy bean-plant-bean cycle. Kingdom, phylum, class and order, family, genus, species. (Try singing that to Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious! It's FUN!) But not much to appeal to The Girl there. We live in a big old sand pile of a state, so I had to mail-order rocks! I should have mail-ordered soil samples, too. Not much there for her. Volcanoes? Try drawing melted rock on your Pictionary pad... Planets? Give it up.

Social studies with Calvert School is "Regions", a study of the regions of the country. I have my "cookbook of the 50 states" book, but I just can't communicate supply-and-demand economics to The Girl. It's frustrating. She understands it's an 8-hour drive north to Auntie's house, another 8 hours further to Uncle's, and another 8 hours to another Grandma's. That should segue to an understanding of the size and variation of Our Great Nation, but it doesn't. And I can't just pack up for a six-month odyssey in an RV.

Heck, just try teaching menstruation using Pictionary. "I'm going to gush what from where? Babies where? You're making no sense. I'm outta here." I am in so much trouble.

So, what now? I can't just wallow in my bad-mom-ness.

Well, the unschoolers say wait for curiosity and pounce on it. Hmm. Still waiting. Even The Boy is totally unconcerned with what's under his feet outdoors. He doesn't care what's in Kentucky. He's not concerned how his t-shirt got here from Guatemala or why. (Okay, he's a little interested in that.) He doesn't want to go see the robotics competition at the local high school. He doesn't care where the trash truck takes the trash. He is uninterested in the swamp ecosystem. He isn't interested in learning to play chess, make a catapult, write a book, compost with worms, protest and repeal laws, or anything else I can think of. I've even tried to think of stuff I hate to do, and came up with nada.

The Husband keeps saying to expose them to things and wait for something to capture their imaginations. But every time I take them on a field trip, they are more interested in what's for lunch later. No kidding, I took them to the rock and mineral museum yesterday, and The Boy spent most of his time taking a poll on where everyone wanted to go to lunch. We're talking 35-million-year-old trees -- trees so old that they turned to stone. And he's allowed to touch everything in the museum! The habitat exhibit was only interesting because he could re-arrange the animal parts to make a strange raccoon-egret animal that looked funny.

He likes science fiction, video games, and Captain Underpants. And ice cream. But he's not interested in making any ice cream. And he certainly doesn't care why the salty ice water makes the ice cream freeze. No curiosity.

I've even tried casually asking him. What do you want to do today instead of school? What makes you curious? Where do you want to go? What do you want to make? What would you rather read? I keep pulling more and different books for reading and getting nowhere. How can he NOT be interested in Star Wars chapter books, Hank the Cowdog, Animorphs, Charlie Bean, Harry Potter, Henry Huggins, and the entire Pye family, as well as the entire non-fiction section of the library?

If he would just start reading for fun, I'd back off completely, but he doesn't. I'm seriously thinking of penning him up with three books and no electricity for an hour a day to see what happens, but I'm afraid he'll just nap.

I'm SO gonna have to finish his "learning style" evaluation. Last I checked, I'm a making-things person and he's a thinking-things person.

Oh well. I guess I'll get out my parts-of-the-body crafts for The Girl, and keep on keeping on. I don't know what else there is.