We met with Malachai’s teacher today, and then headed over to the ESE gal (who I love).
Malachai is in the second highest reading group! However, he has started to tell the teacher “he forgot” what the words are (he’s been doing this at home as well). He is lining up chairs and stacking things on them. He is not doing the work he should be doing. He isn’t staying focused. He is more than able to do the work, and he is being challenged (something I was concerned about because he kept telling us he was bored). He’s been bringing home rocks, twigs and seashells from the playground. Not a big deal, they just finished up doing a dinosaur unit, so they were studying digging, however, he is also telling me how many of each kind he has before he takes them out of his pocket and insisting I put them somewhere safe so we can do something with them later.
They are going to observe him in the class again (he had been doing so well, this is actually the first time they’ve seen autistic tendency from him at all) and we’ll go from there.
Ms. B eased off a little yesterday and today. He is obviously frustrated and thought easing off a little might help him get back on track.
I got a bundle of numbers for local autism-related places. I mentioned one to my dad, we’ve been told it’s great. It’s also 500$ for 12 sessions of 60 minutes each (they would be 90 minutes if he was older). He said he could help us out with that. I’ll have to look into it farther before we decide. We have a handful of other places to call about services. We need to remember to let them know he is high-funcitoning autistic (Mrs. O said he is the second most high functioning child with autism she has ever seen, the other being another student in the school) and see where the trail leads us. Most of the numbers are for low-functioning but they should be able to point us in the right direction.
My biggest worry was that they would want to pull him from the inclusion class, and once he is in special ed he would be stuck there. I know people are always touting mainstreaming kids, but generally once they get kicked back (IME) they don’t get moved again. Well, if we get past this hurdle, he’ll be where he is. He’s so smart, we just need to figure it out.
There’s more, but it’s all kind of jumbled up in my head right now. It boils down to, they are going to observe again, come up with a plan or two, we’ll have another IEP meeting, and go from there.
