One of the goals for the coming year on the IEP is to get the Monster to ask for help when he needs it.
Asking for help doesn’t necessarily come naturally to anyone, but the issue here is getting him to verbally request assistance from another person, be it a classmate or an adult. Continue reading
I was going to write a follow-up to yesterday’s post. I’m going to wait till tomorrow now to do that, since I have a meeting scheduled with the city regarding the abject failure of the bus on a performance basis.
Instead, I’m going to dive back into the whole IEP thing, since that meeting’s a week from today. Continue reading
So I returned home last night to find the Monster screaming his head off from his bedroom as if he’d fallen and had really hurt himself.
By the time I made it upstairs to find out what was going on, I found my wife barricading the door to keep him in his room for time-out. (We made the dreadful mistake of not putting a baby-gate on the door to his new bedroom, which I rectified within 45 seconds of arriving.) The next thirty minutes were a mess of trying to calm him down and find out what had precipitated a meltdown of epic proportions. Continue reading
As part of the Monster’s IEP, he receives speech therapy thrice a week – two pull-outs and a push-in – at school. This was (believe it or not) an increase from what the city schools had wanted to give us, mostly because we insisted at his initial IEP meeting that the twice-a-week sessions were not showing enough progress under his IFSP.
Another part of his IEP, as I mentioned last week, requires regular communications from his teachers so that we know what we can do to reinforce. When we went to school last Friday to get some traction on our issues with communication thus far, we discussed that we wanted more information from the speech therapist, especially in light of a recent evaluation that indicated that there had been regression on the speech front. Continue reading
Verbal communication is one of those pesky things that we all have trouble learning at some point or another.
The Monster, as referenced frequently, handles his limited verbal communication by sticking to scripted phrases that he’s learned. These, by and large, go to the format of “Can I have <X>, please?” He’s figured out enough of English to realize that X can be just about anything. Continue reading
The Monster had another speech evaluation yesterday.
I find it interesting, as we go from therapist to therapist, at the differences in opinions as to his level of function. (For a basic level of evaluation – they require a ‘greater than 25% deficiency’ in function here for services.) He is currently just shy of 55 months, which means that he needs to be speaking at less than a 41 month level to be getting speech services in the schools. Continue reading
Let me lead off with a funny thing about the Monster’s use of language this morning, before I dig into what I really wanted to write about.
On Saturday evening, I went to a party celebrating the end of National Novel Writing Month (which I do almost every year), and because the wife had something going on at our house, I took the kids with me. Monster was, as almost always, exceptionally well behaved in public once I made sure he was well fed. At the end of the party, though, we got slices of cake, and I gave him a portion because he’d been good. “Now Monster,” I cautioned him. “You can’t eat it with your bare hands. You have to use your fork.” He nodded and took his fork and I turned to talk to someone for a moment… Continue reading
While I’ve mentioned over the last few entries that the Monster’s been showing improvement in some of his verbal skills, one thing that is clearly not improving is his grasp on tense.
The Monster grasps present tense and continuing tenses quite well – he can tell you what he’s doing at any given moment and what he is in the process of doing, even to the point of ‘very near future’. (“going to grandma and grampa’s” would be an example of this.) Ask him where he was, or where he will be, and he gets lost. Continue reading
When we went in for the IEP in April, we asked the city to provide ESY services for speech therapy, at the very least. Because their speech therapist hadn’t sent a new report that proved her concern that there’d be some regression (she only sent a letter stating in three paragraphs that she was concerned at the possibility, without evidence), the city denied the request.
Now, it’s not like he’s not had speech therapy over the summer. My insurance is covering a session a week at the Hearing and Speech Agency (HASA), and he’s attending a special day-camp three mornings a week that provides more speech therapy. Continue reading
Part of the Monster’s autism is a persistant developmental delay when it comes to his use of language. He’s delayed both expressively and receptively to a large extent, which has the effective result of having him communicate as if he were a little more than a year younger than he really is.
The majority of the time, his expressive language tends to be riffs on canned phrases. Lately, it’s taken up his repeating artifacts – commercials he’s heard on the television or radio, things he’s heard people in his environment say, or weird linguistic artifacts he’s come up with himself. Continue reading