by Tim on August 27, 2009
After all the stress, frustration, and general drama around last year’s IEP process (our first), this year’s was the complete polar opposite. It is beyond description to have a team of caring, creative, smart teachers and therapists who have the best interests of your child at heart working with you.
I’m not saying last year’s team – compiled by the county school system with no one on the team from the J-man’s current school – weren’t good people. Far from it. Some we liked quite well, but with a couple of people, we did have some adversarial relationships, and it was clear that it wasn’t exactly a cohesive unit of people used to working together. We got off on the wrong foot with our case manager – and never really got back on the right one – and we so totally distrusted the process at one point that we never really quite got over it.
The end result last year was that we completed the process knowing that without all the work we put into it and without all the pushing and standing firm we did, we very likely wouldn’t have gotten what was appropriate for where the J-man was then.
What we didn’t know back then was that we had gotten the IEP Powerball as an added bonus, almost by sheer luck (albeit with a system we admittedly gamed a bit). We got a school and a set of teachers and therapists beyond our wildest dreams.
To say this has been an amazing first year of preschool for the J-man would be a serious understatement. He continues to grow and thrive and learn and do things that astound us. He has worked so hard, and he has had the best teaching and support we could have ever dreamed of.
Around the table the other evening for IEP 2009 were Mary and I, his lead teacher, the teaching assistant, his speech therapist, his occupational therapist, and the school principal. We talked about the J-man’s many great accomplishments and the areas that still remain a challenge for him. In my mind, we were remembering and celebrating the great year he had and diving in with hope and enthusiasm to plan for the future.
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The title describes one of his IEP goals for this year. I think he’s a bit beyond having mastered this. He’s close to a color matching black belt these days.
The middle stack of blocks is a pretty common pattern for him in his little construction projects. He layers the colors together, and it seems like there’s a deeper rhyme to his reason, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. I watch him build these things, and he studies the shapes of the blocks carefully and matches them that way too. I thought the single yellow block on top was him giving it some sass.
The tower on the right shows both some interesting layering patterns but also a lot of size and shape matching along with the colors. I’d love to know more about the bottom, green block and what he was seeing there.
That’s a pretty symmetrical tower compared to some wacky ones he’s come up with. Color layering is a consistent trait of most things he builds, but he’s built some elaborately convoluted structures with stuff going every which way. They have this Seussian impossibility to them; I have no idea how some of them stand up. We bought him some Duplos for Easter, and that was definitely a big hit.
Of course, he’s got the skinny red skyscraper on the left. Speaking of which…
Probably not something you’d find in the 100 Acre Wood, but an impressive stacking feet nonetheless. This and the height of the table combined, the top block is several inches above his head. He was very serious about the layering here too.
He went from hating building with blocks to loving everything about blocks in no time. Now, he’s a building and color expert. Go figure. Nothing if not full of surprises!
In our last IEP goals recap from last quarter, the J-Man had a great nine weeks overall and showed great gains. This past quarter just ended last Thursday, and our little superstar continues to make great strides toward what we thought were some pretty ambitious goals for this year.
As a refresher for those curious about how we do things around here, the quarterly evaluations are done based on how well the kids are progressing toward meeting their IEP goals for the entire year, and then they’re assigned an evaluation code based on the following scale:
1 – Insufficient progress to meet IEP goal by end of year; below expected mastery of goal at this point in the year
2- Skills are emerging; mastery of goal is still inconsistent; student needs support to meet goals
3 – Consistent progress toward goals; on track to meet annual goal
3* – Consistent progress toward goals + some evidence of application and independence (Not sure why they need another 3 score here, but whatever. “Application and independence” are definitely two words we like.)
4 – Annual goal has been mastered; able to generalize the skill independently in multiple settings.
As I mentioned last time, don’t ask me why they felt the need to add a 3* in between 3 and 4 rather than just fix the scale to begin with. But anyway…
We rounded the halfway mark of this year early in March, so in light of that, his progress toward goals he has a few more months to meet is awesome.
Here are those categories and all the great stuff he’s been up to lately.
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by Tim on February 22, 2009
This is Part 2 of our series “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now?”, a journey through what’s happening these days in the life of our autistic 3 1/2-year-old son and sequel to our very popular original article, “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?”.
Note: Wherever you see “DSM-IV” below, this means that attribute is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fourth Edition or DSM-IV. In medical terms, a specific combination of those DSM-IV criteria is what brings about a diagnosis of autism.
Same obvious disclaimer as before: We are not advising you on how to evaluate your child. Go get them evaluated by professionals with extensive experience with autism. Don’t just rely on some random people on the Internet – namely, people like us.
If you haven’t already, go back and read Part 1. If you have, let’s continue on!
Characteristics That Are Significantly Present (continued)
Difficulty with social awareness (a bit better but a lot to work on) – I don’t know whether this has an official meaning, but I think of social awareness in a very broad sense as being aware that there are people around you and that they can be engaged with at some interpersonal level. For some time, we referred to other kids in the room as ‘part of the furniture’ as our son didn’t interact with them much differently than any other object in the room.
School has helped him in this regard in that he has regular time every school day with the same children and is involved in activities with them on an ongoing basis. You still get the sense that he’d usually be content without them, but often the emotions of an autistic toddler are inscrutable.
He does enjoy watching other kids do funny things, but watching rather than playing with children is one of those possible signs of autism, and this is a fairly accurate description of where he is right now.
That said, it is nice to see that he’s aware that other people have names, and he can use a name to refer to a person, though usually now that’s only with some prompting.
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by Tim on February 20, 2009
Many times over, our “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?” post is the most read article on this site. It’s also the post people most often cite as the reason why they write us and become regular readers of our blog. We are gratified by your response to our story about our son and hope all this has been helpful to you and your family.
In celebration of the 1st Anniversary of our blog, I decided to write a multi-part series, revisit that popular post, and update it for what the J-Man is doing now almost 9 months later. The original “What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like?” gave you a snapshot of what an autistic toddler might be like – or at least what ours was like – about three months before his 3rd birthday.
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by Tim on December 17, 2008
We had our end-of-quarter Parent/Teacher Conference yesterday, and we all celebrated how great the J-Man is doing in school.
Since IEPs are all about annual, specific, measurable goals, these four-times-yearly conferences with the teacher are about seeing how he’s meeting the measurements established by those goals. This allows you to make mid-course corrections as needed, argue for more services if your child is way behind on meeting their goals, etc.
It also allows you dedicated time with the teacher to learn all the ways you can supplement your kid’s learning at home. Of course, we’re always working on that with the teacher, but since these meetings occur at the end of the quarter and in year-round school the end of the quarter means three weeks out of school, this is about coming up with strategies to keep the learning going during the break. Combined with the holiday, we actually have 5 1/2 weeks off starting Monday. Yikes!
The classroom he’s in is about way, way more than just the goals on the page, of course, but the IEP is both a good instrument for measuring progress and one of the most important ways of showing what sorts of services and classroom your child needs from year-to-year.
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