At the end of kindergarten last year Tom moved from a 504 plan to an IEP. In it he continues to receive PT & OT twice a week and more classroom accomodations and understanding of his issues were added.
We had our parent-teacher conference yesterday with his 1st grade teacher. She is amazing and we are so thrilled to have her again (she was Harry's first grade teacher, too). She just loves Tom and makes some nice accomodations for him, often in association with the OT. As we talked I mentioned something about his IEP. She didn't know he had one! She didn't have any paperwork on the IEP or copies of any of the testing that was done last year.
Honestly, she is so great that she has already been doing a lot for him to be successful and at first in the meeting I didn't make a big deal about it. But as the day went on I began to realize what a big frickin' deal this is. Because he's been getting the PT & OT since school started, I automatically assumed the IEP was in place. (won't make that mistake again)
She also gave us a note from the gym teacher. She said he is starting a new thing where if he has a child in danger of getting a 'check minus' on their report card then he gives a performance update as a kind of warning.
"In PE class, students are graded on their performance based on our daily participation contract. All students receive a check at the end of class, unless they fail to follow the class rules and expectations. Students who fail to follow class rules or expectations receive one or more numbers to identify the poor performance. The numbers are as follows:
1. not listening, paying attention, or respectful to others or teacher
2. not understanding the task, attempting the task correctly, or following directions
3. blah 4. blah 5. blah
This term, your child has received several 1s and 2s. Please speak to your child about this as it is my goal for all students to succeed in PE. I send this notice to make you aware of your child's performance in PE and to encourage his improvement over the next term. Feel free to contact me blah blah blah..."
Seriously!?! My son struggles to walk down stairs one foot at a time and he's going to 'fail' gym?!
1 - he has documented attention problems
2 - he has extremely poor motor planning ability and can't do most gym activities easily
The classroom teacher said he probably doesn't know about the IEP. If I find out that he made my son feel badly or singled out in any way because of his motor problems I am going to go postal. As if my son doesn't already know he's different that way.
I sent a strongly worded email this afternoon to the IEP coordinator we dealt with last year and copied the teacher, gym teacher, OT, PT and asst. principal/school counselor. (I made sure to praise the teacher) I'm curious what their response will be.
We had our parent-teacher conference yesterday with his 1st grade teacher. She is amazing and we are so thrilled to have her again (she was Harry's first grade teacher, too). She just loves Tom and makes some nice accomodations for him, often in association with the OT. As we talked I mentioned something about his IEP. She didn't know he had one! She didn't have any paperwork on the IEP or copies of any of the testing that was done last year.
Honestly, she is so great that she has already been doing a lot for him to be successful and at first in the meeting I didn't make a big deal about it. But as the day went on I began to realize what a big frickin' deal this is. Because he's been getting the PT & OT since school started, I automatically assumed the IEP was in place. (won't make that mistake again)
She also gave us a note from the gym teacher. She said he is starting a new thing where if he has a child in danger of getting a 'check minus' on their report card then he gives a performance update as a kind of warning.
"In PE class, students are graded on their performance based on our daily participation contract. All students receive a check at the end of class, unless they fail to follow the class rules and expectations. Students who fail to follow class rules or expectations receive one or more numbers to identify the poor performance. The numbers are as follows:
1. not listening, paying attention, or respectful to others or teacher
2. not understanding the task, attempting the task correctly, or following directions
3. blah 4. blah 5. blah
This term, your child has received several 1s and 2s. Please speak to your child about this as it is my goal for all students to succeed in PE. I send this notice to make you aware of your child's performance in PE and to encourage his improvement over the next term. Feel free to contact me blah blah blah..."
Seriously!?! My son struggles to walk down stairs one foot at a time and he's going to 'fail' gym?!
1 - he has documented attention problems
2 - he has extremely poor motor planning ability and can't do most gym activities easily
The classroom teacher said he probably doesn't know about the IEP. If I find out that he made my son feel badly or singled out in any way because of his motor problems I am going to go postal. As if my son doesn't already know he's different that way.
I sent a strongly worded email this afternoon to the IEP coordinator we dealt with last year and copied the teacher, gym teacher, OT, PT and asst. principal/school counselor. (I made sure to praise the teacher) I'm curious what their response will be.
Hi, thanks for posting all this. I read many posts of you on an adhd forum, which I found very helpful. It's good to see people who keep trying and do not give up.
ReplyDeleteMy son was dyspraxic and we followed the INPP programm for two years - 15min every day. Once the 2 years were up he could do everything - riding a bike, swimming, swinging etc, as he was supposed to do. So, it was extremely effective! He is now at age 11 even in the top sports group - isn't that a miracle?
However, he still has problems with adhd behaviour. We now started the crawling programm according to the book 'Stopping adhd'. We hope it will be very effective. Not many people have done it because it is very labour intensive. Hope we can persevere.
Good luck to you - there is hope!
One more thank you to you - I just checked out the book of Svea Gold that you recommanded on the same forum. It's fantastic! She seems to be the most knowledgeable person I've come across on the topic. It's a shame she is not better known.
ReplyDeleteI would like to talk more directly to you but don't know how. Maybe I register on the forum...there is so much doom and gloom there though...thank you very much for your input!!
Thanks so much for your posts! I'm thrilled to hear about your INPP experience and I'd love to know more about exactly what it was like. We're doing a LOT of crawling as part of the NR. I read the "Stopping ADHD" book, too, and it does sound interesting.
ReplyDeleteYou should try posting on the adhd parenting forum (I only go to that area), I've found it very helpful. If you don't want to do that, maybe you could register and send me a private message and we can exchange email addresses.
Hope to hear from you :)
Hi,
ReplyDeletenice to hear from you - I will register when I get a moment. Speak to you soon. Corinna