{"id":1150,"date":"2007-03-19T09:19:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-19T13:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/?p=1150"},"modified":"2007-03-19T09:19:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-19T13:19:00","slug":"accentuate-the-positive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/?p=1150","title":{"rendered":"Accentuate the positive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, Emily had a bad day on Friday. Both of them shared a commonality, which sparked an “aha!” moment for me.<\/p>\n

(Pics are of Emily with a cousin from Christmas. She’s the one with the brown hair and pink shirt. Heh.)
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\nFirst, Emily had trouble in math drawing congruent figures. I can see that. Her teacher says, “It was difficult for her, but definitely felt she was capable. So I gave her a partner to help and she refused their help and couldn’t calm down from there.”<\/i> She had to go to her “special” classroom to calm down. Apparently she actually crawled down the hall backwards toward that room. She came back about 45 minutes later, quite calm.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Also, for the first time this year, they’re having to share books. Her teacher says, “We were sharing health books ( as we only have 10 for our class) and she couldn’t find one that she thought she had in her desk. I looked and there wasn’t one, so I asked her to share with (her friend) -all of the other kids were sharing, too. She got very upset again, and started yelling and crying that she only wanted her book. (Her friend) offered to give her the book that she had, but that didn’t do the trick. I finally got VERY stern and explained to her in my strict mom voice that she could not continue to cry and keep the other kids from learning. She cried quietly for about 5 minutes and then got into the flow with us again. The rest of the day was good.”<\/i><\/p>\n

(Note, I was all set to get up on my “underfunded education” high horse about sharing books until I heard that they had an extra second grade classroom this year that they hadn’t expected to, and that the books are going into a new printing next year, so there wasn’t much point in getting extra.)<\/p>\n

I’ve talked with her about these incidents, and have started a “no crawling, no falling, no bawling” mnemonic. (She deliberately falls on the floor occasionally.) We roleplayed three times that I had a book and she didn’t. Three times, when asked if she could share, she sighed and said very softly and sadly, “no.” We’ll see how it goes this week. Her teacher’s going to be sure she’s one of the kids who has a book and can share hers with someone else.<\/p>\n

I think that both of these incidents started out with something that was hard for her because of her PDD – manual dexterity for the first, unexpected change for the second – but there was an exacerbating factor. So I asked the teacher, “a lot of incidents seem to involve her sharing or teaming with other kids. Have you noticed this?” I also asked if she was being paired with the kids because<\/i> a problem was happening, or if it was generally the other way around.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The teacher said, “I have thought about this and there actually seems to be more frustration over work than if she is working with someone. We are starting to do more centers, small groups, and cooperative learning which she struggles with. If she is in my group, she is usually fine, but center work without adult supervision is overwhelming to her. I truly wish we had an assistant or someone to work with her as I could see that being so beneficial to her academic and social learning.”<\/i><\/p>\n

DING DING DING! This makes total sense. She’s worked with speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, etc., but that’s always one on one. And even when she’s had group speech therapy with other kids, that’s with an adult to supervise and guide. It’s not her strong suit to work with other kids one on one, and she hasn’t had a lot of opportunity to work on that skill. That’s a situation with such a potential for unpredictability, I can understand how that would be frustrating and hard for her.<\/p>\n

So while it may sound frustrating, like “oh, here’s another problem,” I am feeling GREAT that we have actually identified a problem<\/b> because that is the first step toward figuring out how to fix it. Her teacher, who is wonderful about working with Emily, is going to help test this theory, saying, “I am going to try keeping her at a desk by me with work that the others are doing in centers and see how that works.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Her teacher mentioned that we have a re-evaluation meeting this week (news to me) so this was the perfect time to have had this light bulb go off. If Emily needs an assistant in the classroom to facilitate her learning, I’m going to do my very best to see that she gets one. It’d benefit the whole class, since if she’s calmer then the whole day can flow more smoothly.<\/p>\n

So my mission this week is to figure out what school rules and state and national laws require her to get the help she needs in the classroom to succeed, which will probably take the form of an assistant. Because I think that’s going to be the route to getting her unconventional help. People like to stick to what they know, and if I’m asking for something different, I need to help the powers that be see a way to make it happen easily.<\/p>\n

Pushy, but in a nice way. That’s me, on behalf of my child. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I’m going to be talking with others who’ve had to deal with the school system and find out what good approaches are. I’m also going to ask another one of the little Brownies out for ice cream to get her a little more one-on-one.<\/p>\n

It’s one more problem to solve – but we can solve it!
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Well, Emily had a bad day on Friday. Both of them shared a commonality, which sparked an “aha!” moment for me. (Pics are of Emily with a cousin from Christmas. She’s the one with the brown hair and pink shirt. Heh.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}