Parents who never thought they'd be homeschooling are discovering Teachers Pay Teachers, a spectacular website that features downloadable curriculum for nearly every subject, grade level and classroom placement.

We homeschool through a charter school and Tosh receives the same curriculum as his mainstream peers. Sometimes, the material and school work provided is appropriate for his needs. Sometimes it's not.

TPT has so much to offer the homeschooling or distance learning autism parent. The site has what seems like an unlimited selection of hands on activities and worksheets that are either already adapted to special needs students, or can be easily adapted by replacing handwriting with typed, printed, cut and pasted answers. Because it's developed by teachers for teachers, the curriculum usually meets state education standards and is noted accordingly.

Here are four of our favorites:

Fast Food Menu Math

Tosh learns best when he can relate what he's learning to something real. This bundle of branded fast food menu and worksheets is perfect for learning addition, subtraction, money and living skills. It comes in three levels, from rounded dollars to exact change.

Parenting hack: Tosh's buddy's mom (shout out to Jill!) invented a cool game called "Drive Thru" in which a kid drives a battery or foot powered car, scooter or other vehicle up to a patio sofa or first floor window. They pretend to place an order, pay money, receive their food and drive away. This is an awesome game for AAC users. It's become a favorite at ABA, especially after we laminated everything so it can be sanitized and safely shared with friends.

Fast Food Menu Math

$17.95 for all 8 restaurants or $3.25 each

Simple Fractions

We used these worksheets to teach fractions this spring. Nearly every one allows a student to demonstrate mastery of the subject by coloring, cutting and pasting, or doing anything else besides writing with a pencil. This package is massive; it lasted us a good 6 weeks doing one worksheet per day.

Simple Fractions

$6.75

Discovering the Solar System

We spent the first three months of the year taking a full week to learn in depth about each planet in our solar system, as well as the sun and the moon. This bundle included a great PowerPoint slide show for each lesson, and corresponding worksheets that only asked a few questions on each page, very doable. The early finisher work included a word find, which is Tosh's jam, so that was fun. It also includes a color sheet of each planet, which we turned into a glitter art activity. 

Solar System

$20 for all 10 lessons or $4.50 each

Yes-No Flashcards

An awesome speech therapist introduced me to the fact that Tosh didn't understand that yes and no meant more than "stop that" or "give me more." It also means true and false.

These flashcards did a great job of teaching that. They include a set with a question on the top, as well as a set that allows you to ask your own question. Switching things up guarantees that your child doesn't just memorize the answer, they generalize the knowledge.

It also helped Tosh learn to nod his head for each answer, and it taught me that Tosh needs a few seconds to do that. Switching up the question is good for kids with auditory processing challenges; and again, as a parent, going through these cards with Tosh allowed me to better understand when he's struggling to understand spoken language.

Yes No Flashcards

$4