The Skills a Curriculum Leaves Out, Taught at Home
If you are homeschooling a child with autism, a developmental disability or a learning difference, the hard part usually isn't the academics. It's personal space. Strangers. Losing their temper. What happens after school ends. That's the part we make curriculum for.
Most families arrive here having already solved the schooling part. You have found a maths programme that fits. You have worked out reading. What you cannot find is anything decent for the skills that decide how your child's adult life actually goes — and those are the skills the school system was least good at teaching anyway.
These are teachable. They are just rarely taught, because they don't sit in a subject. Standing the right distance from someone. Telling the difference between a friend and an acquaintance and a stranger. Being teased and not detonating. Asking a manager a question. Knowing which adult it is not okay to hug.
We have been making curriculum for exactly this for over forty years — originally for special education classrooms, and now for the parent teaching at home.
The programs were built for teachers who had no special-ed training, which is precisely why they work on a kitchen table. Everything is scripted enough that you can teach it cold, and open enough that you can follow your own child wherever the conversation goes.
Why It's Video, Not Worksheets
Every lesson is built on watching people do the thing — right and wrong — rather than reading about it.
Shown, not explained
A child who tunes out an instruction will still watch a person. Actors play the situation out, usually getting it wrong first and then right, so the difference is something your child sees rather than something you assert.
Repeatable without a sigh
You can play the same scene ten times across a term and it lands the same way every time. That matters when a skill needs far more repetition than a parent can deliver patiently on their own.
Safe to get wrong
The mistakes happen to an actor, not to your child in front of real people. That is the difference between rehearsing a hard moment and being humiliated by one.
Gives you shared language
Once a scene has a name in your house, you can point at it in the supermarket. That transfer — from the lesson to the world — is the whole point, and it is easier when you both saw the same thing.
The Four Things Parents Come For
Your plan includes all 26+ programs, so you are never choosing between these.
Boundaries and personal safety
Who gets a hug, who gets a handshake, who gets a wave. Which adults are safe, and what to do when one isn't. This is the area families raise first and worry about most, and it is the one we are best known for.
Anger, teasing and conflict
The same provocation played three ways, so your child can see the shape of freezing, of exploding, and of handling it. Versions from lower elementary through high school, because a nine-year-old and a sixteen-year-old are not provoked by the same things.
Independence and adult life
Money, safety, getting around, running a home, managing your own time. The material aimed at the years just before and after a young person moves out — the transition that tends to keep parents awake.
Work and first jobs
Grooming, dress and attitude before the interview; then what to do once they are actually in the job — a supervisor's correction, a coworker taking credit, showing up when you don't feel like it.
How It Fits What You're Already Doing
If you are working from goals your child had at school. Social and behavioural goals from an old IEP map onto these programs fairly directly — boundaries, self-regulation, work readiness. You can track which lessons you have covered and export that record, which is useful evidence at a review, for a therapist, or for a co-op that asks what you have been doing.
If you have a therapist or a behaviour team. These programs are used in ABA and speech practices as well as in schools, so there is a fair chance whoever your child sees already knows them. Either way, telling them which scene you worked on this week is enough to get you both pulling in the same direction.
If you have more than one child. The plan covers up to three learners. Many of these lessons are better with two — one sibling deliberately playing the scene wrong is usually the highlight of the week.
If your child is older than the material looks. Choose the program, not the grade. Plenty of families use an elementary program with a teenager because the skill, not the age, is what needs teaching, and nothing in the interface announces a grade level to your child.
What This Isn't
Before you spend anything
- It is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for a therapist. It is curriculum. If your child is working with a speech or behaviour professional, this sits alongside them.
- Your child cannot do it alone yet. You teach the lesson. A self-paced student mode is being built; it isn't here. There's a waitlist on the homeschool page.
- It is not a full curriculum. Life skills only. Your maths, reading and science come from elsewhere.
- No accreditation, credits or grades — you get a record of what you covered, which is not the same thing.
- English only, and digital only. No Spanish edition, and nothing arrives in the post.