Goaltending

photo courtesy of Bill Ward's Brickpile (flickr.com)

We had, a little informally at the beginning, Alex’s IEP meeting yesterday. I say informally, because it began as a sort of rap session about where Alex stands now and where he’s headed in sixth grade in the fall. A form went around at the end of 90 or so minutes with us all in the small hard chairs, when we had to all our satisfaction covered Alex’s goals.

In sixth grade in September, Alex will begin that period of education that leads more seriously to work. This period will head toward that eventual goal in a way more serious than in elementary school, where mostly he simply learned to work and thrive and spend his days in a classroom. Soon the real world will be a little closer.

His teacher and therapists went over what I think is a pretty solid set ofgoals for the next year:

Speech: More listening and comprehension, more concentration on the people in a picture of a group. Uttering more sentences that contain a subject, verb, and object, and using more attributions such as sizes, colors, and shapes. More of what I termed “assemblying” the vocabulary he’s built.

Math: More times tables, specifically the 2s, 5s, and 10s. The ability to tell time and count money (Alex currently must count the change on Friday afternoons for admission to a video at school). (It floored me that he was doing times tables; I’m afraid he and I have never moved beyond that pivotal moment now years past when I was getting him to write C’s and he tried to hand me the pencil and I said “You do it.” That’s become his homework catchphrase since, usually accompanied by handing the pencil back to me.)

“I want him to start carrying,” his teacher said, adding that Alex will often tally when asked to do math, and other times just “doesn’t seem to feel like it.”

OT: His handwriting has greatly improved, if his accuracy hasn’t. He aced the memory and orientation parts of letter-writing, but bottomed out on control, placement, and letter size tests. In other words, Alex found the light-blue lines evasive targets. They want him to continue keyboarding and doing well on a computer program where he finds objects and the computer tells him if he guessed the right answer. Sounds like the workworld to me.