Well, we have one IEP done for this year. Things are going well for our middle son, despite the autism. He is developing friendships with his peers, flirts with the girls, had an issue with electricity and gotten detention twice.
He is high functioning in reading, comprehension, processing, and reasoning. He has issues with verbal communication. He reads at a level that they have a hard time measuring and comprehends at the same level. He is in the 7th grade. The teachers have issue with him just knowing the answer, they need him to write out how he comes to the answer, this is most prevalent in science and mathematics. In ag class, he can identify every tool, every seed, and can tell out of 10 or 15 different tools, which one is missing and what they are all used for. Considering we don’t live on a farm this is quite a feat.
The teachers have issues with his personal hygiene. Mostly that he doesn’t tie his shoes, and never tucks in his pockets. I explained that some things are just not on his radar of important things to worry about. He wears slip on shoes now, so shoe laces are no longer an issue, but even when he had shoe laces, he never tripped over his laces. The science teacher is concerned about when they get into human anatomy and reproduction, and how our son will react. I asked how any other 7th grade boy reacts. So we will wait and see. In time, they will need to do some dissection, hopefully our son will handle it well.
Moving forward we talked about him joining some brain athletic teams, and the golf team. Overall, things are looking very positive for our son. He has a memory and level of understanding of the topics that are presented to him that they are not able to always quantify.
Now we have two IEP’s left. Our oldest boy and our youngest. Both of which promise to be a struggle with the school. Oh, and the detention happened because our son the linguist dropped the f-bomb three times when walking into a classroom.