I am digging around for some information to help a friend. Conventional homeschooling materials do not always work well for autistic students. What do you think are good curriculm providers to look at and good resources?

A lot of it depends on the child's learning profile - do you know his/her sensory strengths/weaknesses? For example, my autistic son is a highly visual learner, with an auditory processing disorder. We used a LOT of PECS to start with (http://www.do2learn.com/ has a lot of free ones, as well as other good special needs resources) while teaching my son to read and communicate. Now that my son is a proficient reader, we do almost everything in writing, because it's so much easier for him to process. We also bought books on Montessori education, and prepared Montessori materials for him (we chose Montessori because she developed her materials working with special needs students; the materials are very tactile, and there's a strong emphasis on learning independence, self-regulation, and social graces in Montessori. This ebook is a good start: http://www.montessoriathomebook.com/).

I know the range for Autistic children is pretty broad but I don't really know the child personally nor have many details about his situation.

He is beyond the age of being taught to read; he is young teen now. They have been doing the public school battle with him for years. They moved to another state this past year and the schooling environments are very different there so they pulled him out to homeschool him. Now they are trying to figure out what to use and which methods might work.

Most of the families with autistic children of that age that I know do unit studies around their child's perseverative interests; we do it to a lesser extent (we spent a couple of months learning everything in the world about spiders, because that was my son was obsessed). Finding a good school for an autistic child is so hard; we're fortunate right now that my son's in a good situation, but always prepared to homeschool if/when that changes.