Where is Samuel Now?

I'll try to bring our situation up to date. Samuel is using third grade material this year, but home schooling is proving to be as much of an adventure as it ever has been. When I started this blog, I had no idea how our lives would work trying to home school a spectrum kid. He remains a challenge behaviorally, but has proven over and over again to be very bright and (when he wants to be) a willing learner.  So how are we meeting his particular needs? I'll start with handwriting.

His handwriting remains a challenge, but he has recently been correcting himself to use a correct grip on his pencil and I'm confident now that he has the needed fine motor control. We are using Handwriting Without Tears, and that curriculum views the switch to cursive as a good time to "catch up." This came as a nice surprise as we had ordered this year's materials with some trepidation. (Cursive? The kid can barely print!) But he's always been able to read cursive and was trying to develop a script on his own.

HWT uses only 4 types of connections between cursive letters and he has already learned several. He's also quickly grasped the idea of keeping his pencil down on the paper continually.  I hope this will be a big year to catch up with his handwriting. In the meanwhile, I'm playing "scribe" to him in some subjects. Why bother, given the plethora of computers? I've seen just enough about handwriting creating additional pathways to the brain to convince me that it is a necessary and useful part of education.