Tristan’s evolving some neat skills – he’s starting to break down words I don’t think he’s seen before and be able to read them (notably: when it was about bedtime a few days ago I wrote out “sleep” and then “sleepy”, and he said them both – neither of which I know us to have taught him)
He’s also starting to be able to do this in reverse – I asked him to spell baby (while he was playing with Magnetic ABCs on the iPad) and he actually used it to spell it out. Managed to g et him to spell “Mommy” the next day, as well. Also very neat.
He’s been using a combination of a stencil + easel and the iXL Cindy sent to practice trying to write letters, as well. Some he’s much better at than others. He can write a few of them without assitance, evidently (X, specifically, which is evidently a tricky one).
As far as services go: after fighting with the process for… 4 whole months now, we started receiving speech therapy for Tristan, as of two days ago. So he’s now receiving 15 hours/month of ABA, 1 hour/week of OT (namely, help teaching him to feed himself) and now 1 hour of speech (general language acquisition).
Additionally, since Tristan has been receiving services for roughly a year, they’ve started his next round of testing – or I should say, mostly finished. The OT side is possibly going to fade out after the review of the tests – he can now do roughly most everything expected of a kid his age – use a spoon (mostly) without spilling (which was one of his major deficiencies), assist in donning / doffing clothes / shoes, etc. Additionally, the OT has been working with him, as of this week, on 3 yr+ skills, like cutting. He actually wasn’t faring too badly there.
We don’t officially have the results of the testing, but from peeking over the shoulder of the person administering it, I may have seen the scores – and for everything but communication/social skills, he was within 25% (AKA: abilities around that of an average 24 month old) Keep in mind this is impacted by the communication issues – if he doesn’t understand a command, he certainly can’t comply with it. Ultimately, it’s a language thing he was still around 33% behind there – not great, but far better than the 50% behind. In the end, this round of testing seems to much better represent his actual abilities (though it’s not perfect, obviously).
He’ll actually wind up going through yet another round of testing in April, through the local school district (which Kirin posted about earlier). Basically, at age 3, it all switches over from one government agency to the local school district. We’ve heard conflicting information about what it takes to qualify at service from that point, ranging from things that he certainly wouldn’t qualify for, to the more logical determinator: “would he be able to function in a normal classroom without assistance?” – so we’ll see.
Also: completely random – Tristan has started to try to perform a front roll without assistance – something that some of the Little Gym can do – presumably he’s learning from them.