Starting school for speech delayed son

[septembersunshine]

Hi all,
My son is nearly four and although he won't be starting school till next September I am really worried about how he will cope. He has very little language and no joining words at all. How will he cope at school? he is being assessed at a child development unit next week and we are waiting for a report on his language (he was assessed recently) but it looks like he has some autistic traits. He has been terrible recently, if I take him to a supermarket he screams at random people and hits them sometimes :( He seems a bit better recently but we have real issues with lifts and escalators.. and people, and cars.. pretty much anything can be a problem for him.

He doesn't play in the normal sense but pushes things around the floor. He won't have his hair cut or washed and is scared by loud noises and sudden movements. He can have explosive tantrums. On the other hand he is very cuddly, lots of eye contact, can pretend play with his sisters and has a great sense of humour and will laugh at 'funny bits' on cbeebies. His nursery always say 'he is a lovely boy but.....' . I am dyslexic and was very late to develop and my husband is from a family of late developers (you know the kind.. 'he didn't say word till he was 4 and then it all came out'...)

The school he is going to is very busy with 60 kids in the foundation year. I guess I'm just worried he will be totally overwelmed by the noise and the amount of kids. Do schools help the kids who have no or little langauge? I have spent an obsessive morning looking at the proscpects and website and trying to work out if the school will be ok or not, there is another one 2 miles away that is tiny and I'm wondering if that's a better enviroment for him...I am just really worried for him and feel very anxious that he won't be able to tell people he is sad or upset about something...

Thanks for adding to the thread. So great to hear she is now really getting on. Like you say, bar a few horrible social moments, the school sounds like a good one.

DS had a settling session the other day and seemed okay. I never really know though as has limited understanding of language and limited speech, so can’t really answer me when I ask what he did!

I fear for the social side if I am honest but I suppose only time will tell.

DS has SALT (private as waiting list was absurd) but am concerned about his unwillingness to hold a pencil/paintbrush. He is a little bit uncoordinated to and dyspraxia crosses my mind, how was it picked up in your daughter?

Thanks again, all this worry - no one tells you about this side of having kids!!

Sorry I've namechanged (again).

I'd suspected dyspraxia with DD2 for a good year or so (when I was looking for things that might be at the route of her speech issues it kept coming up in the verbal form and then of course you disappear down internet rabbit holes which throw up lists of associated issues - and every time we went through symptom lists it all fitted together) - had kind of kept it on the backburner as something I was thinking might have been a possibility but the first parents evening after she started school we had one of those delightful conversations where the teacher was dancing around trying to say they thought there was a problem without anything more committal than that - and it was something like "we've noticed some issues with her spatial awareness" and I just replied "yep, I've thought she probably had dyspraxia for quite a while now" and the look of relief on the teacher's face was priceless.

It's not as much her manipulation of small objects and pencils and things that is "off" with her - she'll spend hours with fiddly little bits of playmobil people - it's her whole concept of spatial awareness, personal space, objects being the right way around (coats on upside down and t-shirts on as shorts are particular party pieces in this house) and with writing it's spatially positioning letters on the page she really really struggles with. Her gross motor skills are all off kilter as well - the number of times I've asked the HV and GP to look at how she walks with her feet crossing and in-toeing and generally just tripping over the floor is ridiculous.

Socially generally she's doing OK with it now - school have really worked to foster friendships that were developing and making sure she's in a class with lots of them next year - there's a clique of queen bee girls who are still pretty downright horrid to her (their mothers are like it to me - it must be hereditary) but they're at least civil now rather than walking away in horror when she starts talking to them. The social stuff was a grim probably half the year before it calmed down and she became accepted as who she is to be honest - Christmas was crap with her sending out cards and being ignored in response and we had lots of shit with party invites being handed out in front of her and her being ignored (and school know I'm not happy how all of that was handled). By about February or so it was really settling down and her speech had come on so well as well that the barrier to communication wasn't a problem anymore and now, apart from the queen bees (think they'll be an on/off problem all the way through school to be honest - that kind of combination of personalities), she's just like all the rest of them in the class.