First Grade Retention Part 2

Ok, four weeks later and I'm in a different place now. Her actual IEP is next week, but I don't have to give them a final answer on the retention yet. Just last Friday, I spoke to the mother of a first grader who was having trouble reading. So much trouble that she elected to remove the child from school in order to provide the copious one-on-one time that she needed to learn to read. Her plan is to revisit kindergarten and all of first grade over four months. So far, she has been making good progress. She's doing 21 days of curriculum each day.

After that conversation, I started thinking that maybe we could do the same thing over the summer to catch Demi up in math. Would it really be possible to revisit weak areas from kindergarten, review the first half of first grade, and push through the last half of first grade so that she has a firm grasp on all the concepts of first grade? A decided maybe.

Additional issues we'll be dealing with this summer: juggling vitamins/meds for attention and vision therapy to repair binocular vision. A full plate, no doubt, but not impossible.

In order to judge the effectiveness of attention meds, I would have to be working with her in an educational setting. "Summer School" would assist me in making better judgments about those meds. Same goes for vision therapy. With a structured schedule for school, I would have to incorporate 10-15 minutes each day for vision therapy and also be better able to judge whether the therapy is making any difference.

Challenge: She resists my efforts to teach her or work with her. She immediately starts negotiating whenever I say it's time for homework. It's a frustrating experience for both of us. How will I overcome that attitude? I suppose the answer is to "make it fun," but I seem to be incapable of doing that. I believe I was cheated on the creativity gene.

Suggestions?

Great First Week of School!

We started back to school last Monday - almost two weeks already!

Demi was VERY ready to go to First Grade. She was excited to tell anyone who would listen.

The first day was exciting for me because she came home with a phrase ("No Homework") written in her papers - and it was legible! She also had a list of spelling words (granted, very easy ones) - only five - that she already knew.

Her special ed teacher (same as last year) was gushing over how much better she was reading now. She has definitely come a long way since last year - but I guess that's true for all "normal" kids. Since Demi's not exactly "normal", it's just amazing to me that she's pretty much at the same level as her peers (just not as independent).

This second week of school has been a little more difficult (90 mins to do her homework on Monday!), but she seems to be getting the concepts in order to keep up. It just takes A LOT of repetition. Her reading is going very well. Math, not so well. Writing, despite the first day excitement, is also going slowly.

In therapy over the summer, her OT has been doing a lot of vestibular stimulation (spinning, crawling with a tennis ball, other exercises). It can sometimes positively impact writing and small motor skills.

We also made a change to her glasses which will hopefully help with the vision issues she seemed to be having last year.

Her speech is gradually becoming clearer, although she still has a long way to go. I would guess that people outside her regular sphere could understand 50% of what she's saying on the first try. Probably 80-90% after asking her to repeat it a few times.

She still takes her supplements every day. Over the summer, I got a bit slack at times (typically when traveling). I noticed behavior changes when she was off them for more than a few days. The changes were mostly decreased attention/increased distractability.