Speech Therapy

I don't know if this is standard in every state, but MN requires all kids to undergo an "early childhood screening" before they start kindergarten. The idea is that it's easier to treat problems (autism, hearing problems, intellectual disability, etc.) if you catch them early.  Some school districts start the screening at age 3, although our district starts at 3.5 - which was back in October for Rose. It was also back in October that we had Rose's biannual school conferences. Overall her teachers gave her glowing praise (my favorite was when they commented on her exceptional emotional development!), but they did raise some concern about her articulation abilities. Now, I've often had a hard time understanding Rose, but I had no basis of comparison and figured all parents must struggle to understand their toddlers/preschoolers, amIright?  So to hear an experienced teacher express concern suddenly brought MY anxiety level to a whole new level! It was officially time to panic.

So I got Rose in for her early childhood screening as quickly as I could, which was Nov 12th. For the most part, she was a rock star! She passed the hearing screen, the visual screen, the gross motor test, the cognitive screen, the social screen...everything except the articulation screening. Huh.

Next (Dec 1) we got referred to the district's early childhood speech therapist, who completed a much more comprehensive evaluation of her articulation, as well as getting more details about Rose's history (social, medical, etc.). She didn't score the test as she went, but I could tell it wasn't going great - particularly when the speech therapist (whose job it is to understand little kids) had to ask me to "interpret" a couple things Rose said. Needless to say, I nearly breaking out in hives by the time the results finally came back.

But Rose, I should mention, loved all this testing! She got to spend some extra time on the test days with me and got to "show off" to these new adults. She had a blast!

And it was only a day or two later that we "finally" got the results: Rose's scores officially qualified her for speech therapy services, so we needed to schedule an IEP (individualized education program) meeting to formalize the plan for special ed.

Gulp.

Yep, my daughter needs special ed.

And clearly I was having a reaction to it - an emotional reaction.

After much reflection, talking with friends, a few unexpected tears, and a couple long sessions of journaling, I think I've come to understand where my emotions were coming from, some of which were quite a surprise to the logical part of my brain! But after much hard work, I got to a place of understanding with myself and could more fully support Rose. (I'd be happy to tell any of you, my loyal blog readers, all the details in person some time. It just feels too personal to type it all out here!)

We had her first official IEP on 12/8/15. The short story is that Rose's standard score on the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation was 69. The test has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which means that scores of less than 70 are required to qualify for special ed. So, in a way, it was a good thing that she just squeaked in! This means that she is eligible for special ed for as long as she needs it throughout school, even as her articulation improves. And since her score isn't super low, she should improve pretty quickly! The optimistic side would be "graduating" in a year to 18 months, but realistically she might still need some help in kindergarten - we'll see.

But the other crazy part of the story is that Mike and I were both a bit frantic trying to figure out how we would get her to speech therapy each week since we both work. And that's when we found out that the school district would pay for her to take a special bus from daycare to the "big kid school" every week for speech class!!! (I am so grateful to pay taxes in order to make services like this possible for us and for others!)

So Rose had her first official speech class on Jan 5. Since it was the first one, I followed her in my car (I wasn't allowed on the bus) and joined her for the first half of the class. That week she was one of four kids total, with three little boys about her age or a little older. The class seemed great, and she seemed to be having a good time!

And now we've also started with weekly homework! (I thought we wouldn't have to deal with that until grade school!) The good news is that it's pretty easy and fun. The first two weeks we just had to repeat a bunch of syllable (ickee, ackee, uckee, okee, achy) and then Rose got to color something - the first week she got to color a stripe on a zebra each time she said the sounds, and the second week she got to color a kite each time she said the sounds:

She especially loves the coloring! She isn't always excited to start the homework (mostly she'd rather play Candyland - bane of my existence - instead), but once we get going I have to convince her to stop after about 15-20min (we're supposed to only have 5min practice sessions at most!). My little overachiever daughter.  ;)

So we did two weeks of the K sound, and now we're moving on to the G sound. And Mike and I are trying to enunciate even better  -- do we both mumble??  Although we did get lots of reassurance that there is no research to date identifying any specific causes for why some kids need speech therapy and some kids don't. But apparently there is at least some genetic component, and since Mike needed speech as a kid, that could be part of it.

That's the big news from the home front! But I will leave you with two photos to make up for this otherwise incredibly text-heavy blog post:

Candyland with Grandma Roles!

Rose loves art projects!

Have a great week! Hope you're staying warm out there.