Speech.

I am well aware that I haven't blogged in eons. Anna reminded me I'm supposed to blog 15 times this month and I've blogged TWICE. My computer is killin' me, Smalls! It is making it very, VERY hard for me to upload any pictures. I have deleted a bajillion things and it still insists that my hard drive is almost full. *Sigh* I'm trying! New York Part 2 is coming, as is Spring Break!

A few months ago I told you that Will had been referred by our preschool to have his speech evaluated. We did that and for six weeks we worked on our own at home perfecting his St- and Sp- sounds. While those improved immensely in the six weeks {and without much intervention by me, really!} he was not a huge fan of working on those with me. I found an iPhone app called Articulation Station that we used in our car {thank you, Beth, for the suggestion!} while we waited to pick up James. It gave us the blends that we were supposed to work on, but it got bonus points because it kept up with the time we spent working and how many he said correctly! It wasn't free, but I thought it was worth it. 

This post isn't going to entertain 99% of you, but I do like to have all of our information so that I can look back. I'm obviously not going to share ALL of the details with you, but I want to remember the experience.

While I was in New York, his Sunday School teacher who is also the preschool sped coordinator called to ask me how things had been going. We met after I returned and because I felt that he just wasn't getting as much as he needed from me, we had a formal evaluation made a few weeks ago. It was such an interesting experience. I was asked questions about his birth, his social development, and his physical development since birth. 

While I was answering questions to determine if he was developing appropriately for his age, he was being evaluated. The process was so interesting to watch. My favorite part was that when they tested his vocabulary, he blew them out of the water. They had a flip-chart that had four pictures per page. She would say a vocabulary word and he had to point to the picture of that word. For instance, for eruption, he should point to a picture of a volcano erupting. He kept going and going and going. Some of them were guesses, but a lot of them he knew. They stopped when he was in the 14-16 year old age range. Smart boy!

He also had to be evaluated by the school psychologist {it's just part of it}. She made him do all kinds of tricks! My favorite for this part was his answer for the question, "How are apples and bananas the same?" She was looking for: they are both fruit. Will said, "They aren't the same. One is juicy. One isn't." Cue hysterical laughter from everyone in the room. CLEARLY there isn't a problem with creativity or vocabulary. {And just for fun, "juicy" sounds like "deucey."}

SO. That was a few weeks ago before Spring Break. On Monday I got a call to schedule a meeting about whether or not he would be placed. Eddie joined us today and we met to discuss his results. It was VERY strange to be on the parent side of an IEP. I was part of an IEP team when I taught high school so I sat in on hours and hours of IEP meetings. Glad to report that my IEP meeting was a very POSITIVE thing because I've seen some very sad IEP meetings that just feel very hopeless. We met with the speech therapist, school psychologist, school representative {the pre-k principal}, and a pre-k teacher today. Will won't go to this school next year {he's staying at the school where I teach - it's private}, but he is being served by the public school system.

According to the school psychologist, he is a very average to above-average boy! He was scored based on cognition, communication, physical development, adaptive behavior development, and social/emotional development. He is on the high end of average in everything except communication. Want to know something funny? He's ABOVE average in communication. He has a lot to say and a huge vocabulary, but those sounds are holding him back! That was GREAT news to me! He's such a smart boy!

The speech therapist reported that, "He exhibits a severe articulation disorder characterized by substitutions, omissions, and phonological processes. It makes it difficult for him to communicate thoughts and ideas in a way that others can understand. His phonological delays negatively impact phonological awareness skills and pre-reading skills. He does exhibit more errors in connected speech than at the word level and speech intelligibility decreases in connected utterances." Whew! I am a little bit sad that he's classified as "severe" because I'm feeling guilty for not having gotten him in before now, but I do feel like we're on the right path! {A phonological processing disorder involves patterns of sound errors. Will substitutes all sounds made in the back of the mouth like "K" and "G" for those made in the front like "T" and "D." He says "Dames" for "James" and "Tup" for "Cup."}

The plan is that Will will start speech therapy two mornings a week - starting next week - to work on clusters, strident sounds, and K, G, and L sounds in words. There are a TON more sounds to work on, but that's what she has written down to start with. I'm so excited to see him make some improvements, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sad to hear that baby voice go. It's time, though. He's going to rock speech!

Speech Screening.

Will and I stopped by the pre-k center today to drop off paperwork for him to be screened for speech. He was my late bloomer for speaking at all and while he talks non-stop now, most of you would only get about 50-75% of what he's saying. I speak his language and when you've been around him a while you would, too, but if you've just met him or you're not around much, you wouldn't get much from him. 

His teachers mentioned in the fall that they thought it was time to have Will evaluated for speech.  His Sunday School teacher is one of the ladies in the preschool intervention program. Once I mentioned to her that we were questioning whether or not to have him screened she told us that she highly recommended it because she can only understand about 60% of what he's saying. I've sort of still dragged my feet getting him evaluated because I can understand him and it hasn't posed any problems yet, BUT the Sunday School teacher told me on the phone last week that the longer we wait the less of a chance there will be to get him in. Once he's in kindergarten they would likely skip right over him because it isn't causing him any problems academically. The thing that did me in is that James has started to mimic him in a teasing sort of way (not to be ugly, just to be funny) and I've decided it's not cute anymore...it's going to begin affecting his self-esteem and it just needs some work!

SO. Today is all about our starting point with Will. First, you need to know that Will is VERY shy. If he knows you or really if he's just playing around you, he is fine. If he has to speak to you he just won't unless he knows you well or feels comfortable with you. And even then sometimes he will cower behind me. He is a Mama's boy for SURE. He has always taken time to feel people and situations out where James will jump right in. Typical second child, I guess. He bases his feelings often on what he's reading from us and he's very introspective and quiet. Second, when he is speaking and we run into trouble understanding him, he is a PRO at context clues. I may have shared this story before, but we were coming home from school one day and I asked him what they had done in his class. He said they read a book about a "nom." After asking over and over what a "nom" was and trying different words that I thought were possibilities, he finally said, "Ugh. MOM. A NOM. Where chickens wive!" He told me yesterday (after becoming very frustrated that I couldn't figure out the word he was saying) that, "I just wish NAMES was wiff us!" James is usually his interpreter. Will has a HUGE, HUGE vocabulary. It has nothing to do with not knowing words...they just don't come out! 

I will also say that between ages 2-3 we saw HUGE leaps and bounds with his speech but from 3-4 we haven't seen as many changes. I'm going to include two videos on this post that I'd intended to share next week. Both are "interviews" as he is approaching his birthday. I took the first one last year and the second one this year, just a  few weeks ago.

We actually have a speech pathologist at preschool with us, only she isn't in the role of speech pathologist right now. She's a 2 year old preschool teacher who stays home with her four kids and just happens to have a speech degree. BUT we pulled her in the other day when considering what to write on Will's application. I know NOTHING about speech, but there are plenty of sounds that prior to four they don't worry about because they are developmental and he isn't behind. I *think* the sounds that concerned her were Fs, Ts, Ks, and Gs.

The screening today went great. We actually stopped by to drop off his paperwork and Mrs. A. (his Sunday School teacher) saw us and pulled us in to meet the speech pathologist. We interrupted their lunch, but Mrs. A wanted to get us on her calendar for a screening and while we were there she wanted Will to speak for the speech teacher. He was very, VERY shy at first and I thought he might not speak at all. He climbed into my lap and wouldn't answer any questions. They finally pulled him over to a table and pulled out a sheet with pictures on it and pointed to a picture to get him to say each word. He definitely thought it was a game. Mrs. A also got Will to tell the speech teacher about his Sunday School lesson recently. I think it's just because she knows what he knows (I don't think it's because of any sounds in particular), but she's gotten him to do this for me a few times recently, too. He will say that, "Dee-zus was baptized in da Dordan Wiver by Non da Baptist and a dove tame down fwom da sty." He actually said today that a pigeon came down from the sky and everyone thought it was hilarious.

He did GREAT on the screening. She wrote down a ton, TON of notes about his sounds and then she decided to start with two sounds - sp- and st-. We are supposed to work on those for at least 10 minutes a week for 4-6 weeks (and I need to tell his teachers which sounds to focus on as well). After 4-6 weeks they'll bring him back in to see if any progress has been made. I'm not sure where they'll go from there. She did mention speech twice a week today so we will see if that winds up being the case. 

She said his is a phonological disorder (he is substituting sounds made in the back of the mouth with those made in the front of the mouth...because it's easier to say but at this point he should've outgrown that). For instance, he says "tup" instead of "cup." James actually did this for a LONG time, but his was very mild compared to Will. She also mentioned the word "liquid," but I have no idea what it was about. I can't wait to see all the progress he is going to make!!!