BIT meeting

Earlier this week, I blogged about WF's math, and school in general, issues. We met on Thursday about supports for next year and, although I wasn't thrilled with the idea of the meeting, I came out of it in a better frame of mind. We talked about his focus issues, his spelling issues, his "floppiness", his habit of writing numbers backwards, etc. Today, it occurred to me that I should have asked them about his stutter as well, but I didn't think about it at the time. They agree that most of those issues are real issues and we talked about several things to help him overcome them. Unfortunately, OT has been cut in the district so he hasn't been seeing an OT all year so their first recommendation was to contact my insurance and see if they cover OT services at Carle. Of course, by the time the meeting was over, insurance was closed and then I worked late on Friday and didn't get the call made then either. It is on my calendar for Monday. If they cover it, the school wants me to at least get him evaluated and either do the exercises at home or take him regularly for therapy. For spelling, they want to start him on Barton Spelling. which is a different type of spelling program. Unfortunately, it clocks in at $250 a lesson for 10 lessons, taking you all the way to high school. It isn't going to be something we are going to purchase for him, but I'm assuming that the school has the system, since they said they are going to start him on it. The school psychologist said there is an iPod app that is similar and she is going to email me the details of that so he can start on it over the summer. They said OT would help with the inability to sit up (he is constantly laying over and flopping on other people's desks and being annoying) as would sitting on a therapy ball, since the first time he tries to flop over, he'll fall off the ball! LOL They are also going to get him a math tudor for school. Instead of doing math in class with everyone else, he will sit with this person and learn things at his own pace. They want him to practice math facts at home but he can figure out the math, just not quickly. I think the ability to do it is more important than the ability to do it quickly.

They suggested that he needed to work on hand eye coordination, which isn't surprising. The surprising thing was that they suggested playing Wii Fit for 30 minutes a day to help him get better. They said that 15 minutes of Wii Fit yoga and 15 minutes of balance games each day would help with balance and the floppiness. They also suggested that he play Wii Sports to improve his hand eye coordination. Sending him to the garage and telling him to play tennis or baseball on the Wii fits our schedule a lot better than taking him to the court or the field and hitting balls with him!

Over the summer, everyone is working on school work, everyday. We are starting with Kindergarten sight words and working our way forward for both kids. Both kids will practice K and 1st grade sight words, until they know them like nobody's business. We will also be working on spelling, either just going over the previous spelling words or through the iPod app. We are going to practice handwriting and reading for both kids. Our goal is to get WF caught up and MF starting first grade at least a little ahead. I've already started compiling lesson plans for both of them and working out a timeline to keep us on track. We'll see how our summer of homeschooling goes.