Hi Elizabeth,
We had the evaluation meeting just before break, and it turned out that they qualified him for an IEP on the basis of behavior and also speech. Our IEP meeting is this Friday.
At this phase, the first task is to make a list of all the issues identified in the evaluation, and start imagining what is needed to remediate or accommodate those issues. I like to walk into IEP meetings with a summary list of all the things that MUST be addressed before we leave.
They were talking about "push-in" to work with him on social skills in the classroom. Can anyone explain to me a little about what that means? Right now he's still really in a parallel play phase, and rarely interacts much with other kids in the classroom.
We had a ton of push-in services for DS11, and it was the single best thing that school did. Instead of pulling DS out, we had a special ed teacher in the classroom to support skills like learning to participate appropriately, work in a group, raise your hand at the right time, etc. The goal from the outset is to build specific skills, then fade the support so the child is demonstrating those skills more and more independently.
The special ed teacher can also take data on problem behaviors (or lack of positive behaviors like hand-raising or conversation with others) and that data tells you how things are going and how to adjust the strategy.
The SLP wants to work with him on summarizing and other comprehension skills (I assume on a "pull-out" basis).
Likely pull-out, and likely a good idea.
Honestly, I wish our school had been this proactive with DS11 at that age.
His teacher has him in a much lower reading group than we expected, mostly because he can't seem to retell a story that he just read.
Both of my kids have retelling issues. For DS11 it is a perspective-taking deficit: he cannot imagine that the other person doesn't already know what's in the story (especially the teacher who gave it to him in the first place)-- and then he can't figure out what is important to tell. This has improved with experience and perspective-taking training.
It can help to have specific testing that separates out the components of reading, so that retelling is tested as a separate skill from decoding or comprehension.
Because our school uses a retelling-based reading test, they have systematically underestimated my kids' comprehension skills.
"Hyperlexia" has been thrown around a bit, but he's able to define words quite well, so I don't think that's exactly right. He did really well on a test of identifying opposites of words, for example.
A hyperlexic may be able to identify meanings of individual words, but then they don't process those into an overall meaning.
We had a neuropsych test done, and the advice pretty much boiled down to "no diagnosis, but something is not quite right with this kid."
How long ago was that? We found that the accuracy of neuropsych evaluations improves as a child goes through the elementary years, and it can take more than one eval to get closer to the truth of what's going on.
What tests did that neuropsych eval include? And what did they find?
DeeDee
