Christmas paper making.

Colour, art appreciation and Christmas papermaking was the agenda for today’s home school. Although boy was supposed to attend school, he refused. Agreeing to do two hours of schoolwork, we managed to get into an intense argument over what the terms of agreement were.

I put my foot down big time and informed boy that the consequence for non-schoolwork compliance would be the loss of attending Laser Tag on the weekend. He complied.

Partner took him to work this morning to show him how people are paid – pay roll day. Boy even spotted a mistake prior to pay roll’s virtual fly to the bank. Excited he was and sang his own praises all afternoon. Partner was also grateful that Boy spotted the mistake.

After completing a work sheet on the colour blue, Boy made some Christmas paper from plain A4 photocopy paper. We are giving friends and family copies of my book, Bitss of Caramel Marmalade on Toast, and a single piece of A4 paper wraps the book with no paper waste. The wrapping paper is beautiful, boy had a great time and we were able to build some quality talk moments into the activity. Our talk centred around colours and art interpretation. How educational!

The winning trick for turning what started as a disastrous day, into a successful day, was to present the activities to Boy as though they were non-school related. This is my lesson to learn. I get so upset when he will not complete his set schoolwork tasks that I make the situation worse. I need to wrap my mouth with Christmas paper and remember that my words are a gift, supposed to bring pleasure, rather than being an extension of an institution that sets his Aspergers idiosyncrasies on a firecracker path.

I think his paper turned out well (pictured). What do you think?