OK I know Liam no longer in kindy but figured would post this up here rather then in another folder since I mentioned the meeting in another thread and thought I’d give the update.
No big surprises but mainly because over the last few days I had gotten print outs sent home of testing results and MAN you can learn a lot about your kid in these assessments like there is an invisible man who lives in his room and also he broke a bone in his foot??? Liam not the invisible and NO clue where either came from but anyway it was decided he has a physical disability in terms of school for the IEP. Common consensus is he is very bright, personable, a bit over active but not to the point of disruption and the biggy is when it comes to pen to paper he has issues and some in formulating sentences when given a topic or word to use. He also seemed to tire easy and give up. I guess they also just had their DIBLES tests this week and Liam scored very low, which the speech path questioned because last year he did very well and in her testing she knew he knew more but shut down. His teacher didn’t do it so she couldn’t speak on that but it was decided not to retest at this time since he will benefit from the help since his score meant he qualifies for title 1 tutoring too.
The writing issue for now they feel maybe tied to lack of upper body strength. He also had some gross motor skills issues along with the fine so that’s all where the physical disability comes into play and they can also put his speech under that. Now its possible his lack of focus, activity level and even aggression can be attributed to this. If its hard for him to write he may loss focus quickly, or resist the activity so his IEP will also address arrangement that can be made to help address those.
The pyschologyst was very impressed with a response he gave about not keeping up with the class and feeling sad and she thought for a 6 year to recongnize that and vocalize was well beyond his years. They are a little worried of somethings emotionally so we are also going to have him meet with the school councelor and probably tie that into her helping us with the next biggy which is surgery he is having next month for a speech issue.
They also questioned that he seems to be switching half way through something to his left hand so are wondering if he really is a lefty not a righty but DH thinks his right hand just gets tired. Which they mentioned an interesting thing about writing and upper body strength and thinking of it Liam could never do the monkey bars, I’d watch his other friends last year and they could and he always wanted to but never could. He did start this year (not that his writing has improved) but was interesting because I am going to do some play ground research on the kids who are very good at it do they have good writing, just curious but also going to look into maybe a gymnastics program or maybe rock climbing (have a feeling DH won’t go for gymnastics) but something to help build that upper body strength. They will work on it at school in OT but they also said it was good we had him in different sports and that will help with his gross motor skills.
