As my son gets older, I see a common thread at IEP meetings. He does not understand abstract concepts, but he does just fine with the pragmatic skills. He struggles with problem solving skills and that just affects so many areas. His challenge is to understand expressions that are abstract like IDIOMS, where people do not say EXACTLY what they mean. I hear jokes all the time about how men really don't "Get" women because they are too abstract, but this really "takes the cake". He just does not understand different form of expressions, like sarcastic humor for example. He will take you literally at what you say.
Reading comprehension seems to be a constant struggle. I usually give him a post it note to stick on his chapter while reading and hand him a pencil. The post it note, asks, "Who?", "What is happening in this chapter?", "Where?" and "Why?' and it helps him to look for those clues while reading. I will stop him at the end of each chapter to summarize what he read and talk about it. I am training him to do so. This has greatly helped his reading skills this past two years.
Language arts is just not his thing. Although, I loved the resource teacher he had for many years at his previous school who focused on this area. She must have loved language arts because she focused on this area, and I did see a great improvement in his understanding during her time with him. If you saw him now, then you would be amazed with his ability to organize his thoughts into a written form. It is one of his favorite past times. He writes his own stories, comic strips, and plays that he persuades his kid sisters to play act out with him. I am so thankful for that inspired woman! She's helped him out a great deal. His current two page summary book reports look awesome and like a kid for his age group, but Mom still had to edit it because I occasionally still see grammar and punctuation mistakes.
They are always working on social skills too. It is tailored to his needs. He typically gets these goals interlaced with speech therapy goals because his speech is just fine, but the way he talks or interacts with others comes out through speech.
One of the biggest reasons, that he has for needing special education services is not so much for the educational goals, although in order to get special educational services you have to make up educational goals...but the big reason he still has help at school is more behavioral concerns. He is a perfectionist. He struggles with the ability to regulate this emotions by himself and still needs coping strategies. As the gets older, the demands of school get harder, so this plays a role. I think it is difficult for him to process that each teacher, which changes each year, they have different expectations of the students. He gets overstimulated in a big group and works better in a smaller group, but all the schools we have attended are overcrowded so he has to cope with bigger class sizes.
They give him sensory breaks to help him with the behavioral things and help him take a "breather" and remind him of the coping strategies while there. It is only about ten minutes long, but long enough to take a short recess from whatever worked him up. They redirect him and send him back to class.
When he has the emotional support placements lined up, he functions at a very impressive cognitive level. However, we learned last year, as we moved to a different state and dealt with many changes that change is very hard for him and also he clashed with his teacher, that he functioned at a much lower cognitive level. I was tempted to re-assign him to a new teacher because I was really concerned, but then I realized that life is not that perfect. He needed to learn how to deal with conflicts too and clearly this was one of those moments. I decided it was good experience for him to learn to deal with life's unexpected things. We survived that ordeal and learned a lot from it. I just hope most years we have things going smoothly, but as you know, it is okay to occasionally deal with the "bumps in the road".
