Speech therapy goals & communication
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| Thu, 09-07-2006 - 1:10pm |
David goes to speech therapy twice a week at school for conversation/social skills. It still feels weird to say he has speech therapy, because ever since he was a year old his use of language has been impressive and even advanced; we're lucky that the school recognizes the need for therapy in the *social* aspects of language. He never had trouble with pronunciation, and he's been speaking in complex sentences from early on, but he still struggles with understanding when it's appropriate to sing out, "Pull down ma underpants and splat a cream pie on my butt!, and when it's NOT. It would be so easy to just chalk it up to bad manners.
The speech teacher gave notes to the parents and classroom teachers of the students she works with. I was very pleased and impressed that she did this. The note to David's teacher explains, "This student was dx with: A delay/disorder in social skills secondary to a dx of Aspergers.
"Communication Goals are: Recognize expected and unexpected behaviors in others and himself and problem solve on how to change the unexpected behaviors to promote good social communication.
"Classroom Implications:
This student is working hard on how to communicate with peers. When group projects are anticipated he may need extra instruction on how he plans to interact with the group (e.g. picking jobs). "
I'm really happy that she did this. So often, the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. It's so refreshing to see some actual communication. It's also nice to see that the classroom teacher is being reminded that social skills don't come naturally to David. His social skills have improved a lot this past year, and I suspect it's due to this speech class.
Evelyn
David, AS 3rd grade
Nathan, NT Kindie

She gave that to the teacher and the parents? Did she have your permission to give it to the parents? If not that was a MAJOR breech of confidentiality.
I would LOVE that kind of communication with the teachers. Nice that she does that. But I would be very concerned if she was giving out info like that to those not on David's IEP team. Some parents are receptive to that kind of info and some are not. I just wouldn't want loads of strangers knowing unless I had the chance to brief them and kind of feel them out first myself.
Renee
Oh, no, I guess I didn't explain that too well. I have a tendency to write 20-paragraph posts, and sometimes try to trim it down so people don't go crazy reading it. The page was divided into two halves. One half was "Dear Teachers..." and appeared to be a one-size-fits-all letter. The other half was just about David, and the letter was labelled confidential. The other parents would have gotten a letter that had the same "Dear Teachers" part, but info about their own child. I didn't get info about any other kid (or even know who those kids are), and vice versa.
Evelyn
What I wouldn't give to have our school recognize these needs my son also has. They are only looking at academics and that is it.
My son says things that are not appropriate as well. He was at dinner with my parents one night and declared "My daddy has a hairy pee pee". I should be surprised as my dh often doesn't know his own appropriate conversations. One I was hosting a candidate forum and was introducing candidates, asking questions of them and taking questions from the audience. My dh stood up to ask a question and I was a nervous wreck, I almost didn't call on him- but figured that would be rude.
She sounds wonderful!!! Unfortunately, we have the old-school ST and OT......speech does not include social skills in our schools and I wrote before about our wonderful (NOT) OT.....Vaughn was denied services "because his handwriting is fine."
Christie
Yeah! got to like that Speech therapist! Ours is like that as well! She's always making sure the classroom teachers know what needs to be worked on and even comes into the classroom to work on tranferring what they're working on in speech over to the regular classroom. Last year when the class was not understanding why Weston was so different and "weird", the teacher and speech therapist gave a really good explaination of autism and aspergers and the whole why he is different and yet what he does very very well. They also pointed out that even NT kids have things they don't do very well and things they do very well.
I'm so glad David has someone who understands somewhat on his side!
betsy