Ok, so luckily I'm just outside of Philly
That should give me 3.5 years until the September when my son will be 8. The district, IU, and wraparound staff are all going to be very unhappy when I announce my plans to skip out on all of the BS they are trying to force us into. I note that no one here said to give their program a shot, which I was at least willing to do. So far everything we have done has just made things worse but they always guilt me into something.
Right now I am able to go through the whole day with my son, including 4 hours of structured, parent led time with a ton of transitions, with no aggression and with very good compliance. At school there was almost no compliance and daily aggression. So much for that ODD the experts were so worried about. I am convinced he is a nice kid and that it was just too much for him. The aggression spilled over at home as well. Yesterday and today we went to the local place with free play and both days he played beautifully with another girl there and there was no aggression and he was very social with her.
When he got kicked out of his school I took him off of the anxiety med he was on as we were only using it to help him calm down enough not to lash out at others. I find it interesting that anxiety has gone down so much after leaving the school program even though at the same time we titrated him off of Prozac. His wraparound staff is also going to be mad at me when they hear I dropped his med. Oh, well.
So, regarding Singapore Math, there look to be 3 versions. Is one considered the best version? I looked at the placement tests and some of the stuff covered is a little different from our books and probably a little harder. I'm going to print the tests and use them one day at a time for math and see where he ends up. Do the actual workbooks it comes with look a lot like the test items?
I did try to have him do the test while sitting on my lap at my PC, but he kept complaining he couldn't see well enough. I zoomed it in a lot before he seemed to be able to make out the symbols. Looks like I should schedule another vision eval. The last one was over a year ago and they said all looked fine. I had taken him in because he rubs his eyes so much while reading, but they said it's probably a stim or something. They did the standard eye chart test with some sort of kid version instead of letters. He still rubs his eyes the whole time he reads. Can distance vision suddenly drop off? I know he could see better than I could last summer as he read the ads on planes passing over at the shore.
I also dropped his OT and PT. He hated going and didn't cooperate there at all. I didn't see any benefit. Now that he isn't required to throw a ball for therapy, he's actually showing some interest in trying it for fun. Go figure. I'm beginning to wish we had just ignored everything the experts have said over the last 3 years. I had thought that maybe some of it was useful, but I'm changing my mind. Just trying to get back to the way I had originally wanted to parent my son. We are both already so much happier.
My son might not be like all of the other 5 year olds, but he's really starting to figure everything out and I'm starting to feel confident he will grow up to be a nice person. So, ironically I'm pretty darn happy we got kicked out of another school. And I'm also saving a ton of gas
