Ok, so today didn't start out so great and I'll be waiting to hear from Liam, especially, how his day went. He meets with the school psychologist today for the first of his weekly get-togethers (this is the one replacing the woman he met with last year who is currently on maternity leave.) I have to talk with her after to discuss his language processing stuff. Specifically the fact that just in the last week he's gotten a lot worse in his starting a sentence then stopping, starting over, pausing and eventually getting really frustrated because he can't get his thoughts into words the way he wants to.
We talked with his therapist last spring about this. The problem is figuring out what kind of testing and/or therapy would address his needs. The school offers speech therapy, but his speech is fine. He can pronounce his words and sounds with no problem. It's getting the thoughts into words... there seem to be some overlapping therapies that may address some of those issues but we're having a hard time finding something to address that specific issue; how to help his brain better connect to his mouth.
For my teacher and counseling friends, feel free to offer any ideas. This is something we've been trying to work on for a few years now and as he gets older it gets more and more noticable that the other kids his age and in his class have a much easier time with their words. And that bothers him.
Please know, this is not a "crisis." This is the nature of the stuff he deals with. We figure out a way to adapt and move on to the next challenge. Some things are not a challenge at all so it's not like his identity is wrapped up in having these issues. But the flip side of that is that we want to help him continue to adapt so other people don't start to identify him strictly by his issues. Liam is such a phenominal kid. I refuse to let anyone slap a label on him and think they've got him figured out.
2 comments:
Don't dismiss SPEECH - because the second part of that "title" is LANGUAGE... so having an evaluation done by a speech language pathologist would be beneficial!!
PS - Hadley still talks about Sean being her boyfriend.
I know someone at school is working with a client with similar language issues. I'll see if I can find out how they're working with them. But if you're sure about the OCD, I'd say it's probably related to that.
I won't see them for a week or two because of our schedule, but I'll let you know when I get a chance to talk to them.
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