Speech and School Update

M started school five weeks ago. She goes four days a week and loves it! She doesn't talk a lot about it, but she will answer questions. She can always tell me what she had for snack! Her favorite activity seems to be the jungle gym. She seems to like her teachers and speech therapist (and calls them by name). Though it is a speech and language classroom, I can't say that I have seen huge improvements in her speech. By this I mean that her articulation has not noticeably improved and she doesn't seem to be stringing longer sentences together. However, her vocabulary has been expanding. She also seems to talk throughout the day more. M has improved her alphabet, and she counts better, too. She counts past ten now (correctly, for the most part). Other than when we were counting steps, I never counted past ten with her. Oops. She also likes to try to remember the letters in her name, too. M rides the bus daily. This past Thursday I picked her up from school since I was in the area, as I am every Thursday. She wanted to ride the bus! She cried for about ten minutes, but at least she didn't throw a tantrum. Her bus ride is long, about 45-50 minutes. The classroom is about 25 minutes from our home, so it's not a surprise. Personally, I look forward to spending some time in the classroom. I want to see how it operates and how speech is incorporated into everything. When we visited before, we were quite the interruption, and I was not impressed with the speech incorporation. However, as a former teacher, I fully understand that what happens on a regular basis may not happen when a visitor comes. We will be changing the goals on her IEP to better meet M's needs. Basically, she can already meet the goals, so she isn't being pushed to do more. The SLP has to work on the goals, not go past them. The SLP and I have already spoken about changing goals. I am hoping to get paperwork this week. In case you are new to the blog, M has a speech disorder called apraxia. It is not outgrown, but is overcome. M is doing a fabulous job of overcoming it! She is still hard to understand, but she is doing wonderfully. If you are interested, you can read about M's situation.