Verbal Goals

I was going to write a follow-up to yesterday’s post.  I’m going to wait till tomorrow now to do that, since I have a meeting scheduled with the city regarding the abject failure of the bus on a performance basis.

Instead, I’m going to dive back into the whole IEP thing, since that meeting’s a week from today.

I woke up this morning to find a note from the teacher that she’s been slightly delayed in getting us the draft IEP, but that she’ll have it for us on Thursday.  We also haven’t received any of the other paperwork from the city on their specialists’ evaluations, and Thursday is 5 days before the meeting… so this should get interesting.

Plus, yesterday we got a copy of his latest IEP status update for the current plan, which had us sitting over dinner and discussing the conclusions that were contained therein, especially in light of what we want to concentrate on for the coming year.  Last year’s speech/language goals, though:

  • Given exposure to materials, will demonstrate improvement in his understanding of vocabulary to improve his ability to answer questions with 80% accuracy as measured by informal procedures – He’s doing better with this.  He is showing some progress towards the objectives under this goal, but I’d definitely still not call him even approaching ‘normal for his age’ yet.  (His vocabulary’s really never been a problem – it’s getting him to use it expressively.)
  • Given modeling and pictures as needed, will use 4-6 word sentences to comment, request and protest as measured by informal procedures with 80% accuracy – He can do quite a bit of this, but he needs prompting on some of the objectives (greeting/farewell) and his ‘spontaneous sentences’ are usually spontaneous use of scripted phrases.  This is one of those goals that we’re going to be pushing harder next year, but some of that might also fall under social (such as getting him to, himself, say hello or goodbye without prompting).

I have some definite ideas of what we need included on speech/language for next year, though, beyond these goals:

  • Enunciation – the Monster’s diction is a problem.  He tends to mumble or, worse, just hum words instead of saying something audible.  “Can I have mmmm-mmmm please” is not meaningful communication.  He also tends to decrease in volume through a sentence or speak softly from the get-go, and these are things that a speech therapist could and should be working on with him, with parental reinforcement.
  • Pronunciation – (The wife wants this one) His pronunciation could use work.  Specifically, he speaks a bit marble-mouthed at times and that could be something they could work on for clarity’s sake.  I’ve pointed out that enunciation might  matter more as a primary goal than pronunciation, and she’s willing to agree with me on that.
  • Stressing the comment/request/protest goal – this is more associated perhaps with his toiletting than anything else, since he’s not often clear about what he actually needs, but rather will call for her and grab his pants or something like that.

All of these are things we’re going to have to cope with in the coming school year… plus working to get him eligible for ESY (which they denied him last year), AND the fact that we’d like to see more speech services since that hasn’t shown as much progress as we had hoped.  It should make for an interesting meeting…

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