God what do I do with my poor DS?

[inappropriatelyemployed]

He couldn't get to school at all today. He has only been going in for part of the day with me. He was wailing and crying about putting his uniform on and how he can't cope.

Where do we go from here? His third school. One period of HE already. School will do whatever they can but he can't cope and I worry I am damaging his mental health.

He finds it so hard to explain how he feels but he can';t cope with kids at school. We went to a special school to look around yesterday and he wouldn't look in the classes and got visibly stressed out at a glimpse of a child in a far off corridor.

What do you do?? CAMHS? HE? This can't go on.

[dev9aug]

Star just out of interest, can you tell me who is doing ABA with a child who has CP, I will be interested to know what they are doing?

[StarlightMcKenzie]

Oh, I thought it was you

Sorry.

[ouryve]

Why is it seen as "normal" to put our dc with other dc of roughly the same age and expect them to all perform to the same level in the same way? When will that ever happen to them again?

Yes, extremely odd, really.

One of the SS's I visited had all of the primary school children in one room for a very loud music session. I mentioned that DS1 would never cope with that and they mention that they work on de-sensitisation so that children with sensory difficulties with such a grouping can join in. I stopped at questioning what for. Standing in a small room with 90 other people, making a lot of noise is not an essential skill for adult life.

Both of the SSs I visited had horribly echoey halls used for assemblies and dinners. Completely unsuitable and one of them was so bad I actually flinched as I walked in, and that was with us being the only people in there.

The indy school I visited took me into a lovely carpeted room with ornate windows and dark wood panelling which absorbed all the glare and echo and said they don't other with assemblies, but sometimes have small groups gather in there, if they need a bit of space for a meeting. Far more sensible, IMO.

DS1's current school doesn't insist he attends assemblies and when he does, he's often allowed to sit at the side with teachers, so he feel less crowded in and can make an easy escape if it gets too much.

[dev9aug]

Oh, we are, I thought you knew someone else as well.

[ouryve]

I like your word choices, Justa. DS1 would deliberately get some wrong because it's funny, of course!

As an aside, some of the "comprehension" exercises done in schools test very little (and even less about understanding of the actual text), particularly with kids like ours who already have language difficulties of some sort. There's some good examples here - www.freelists.org/post/etni/Fw-nonsense-text-to-teach-reading-comprehension - many kids could just blindly answer the questions, correctly, not demonstrating that they understand anything, since the text is plainly nonsense. Justa's text tests comprehension much more deeply. I might just steal the idea!

[ouryve]

I always take it as indicative of understanding when ds1 takes pleasure in wrong answers

He found my massive Collins hachette French dictionary, earlier. Dh was somewhat dumbfounded by the "letters" e kept handing him, based on facts he had found.

He would be easy to HE in this respect. The barrier would be our collective sanity.

The senco mentioned to me that change of placement would be opposed on grounds that he is making progress. The boy makes progress, left to his own devices, ffs!

[MareeyaDolores]

Marking the bigIQ bit...

[Badvoc]

Found the bbc did some good educational stuff....games, quizzes, worksheets etc (and if curse free)
We also used maths whizz for maths which was very good but can't remember how much that cost.

[inappropriatelyemployed]

For older children, have you seen the Khan Academy

DS responds really well to the numeracy stuff on there which builds gently.

There was an article in the Guardian about it a while back.

[inappropriatelyemployed]

Mathletics do a HE reduction of about 40% too.

Also, in terms of social skills, has anyone tried watchign the Young Apprentice (or even the Apprentice if you vet for swear words!).

There are loads of really great social skills - good and bad - on display. Non verbal stuff, boasting, interrupting, listening

DS LOVES it and we talk about them throughout.

[streakybacon]

We used Maths Whizz too when ds was younger, but I'm not sure if they still have a HE discount.

Conquer Maths is excellent too, and goes up to A level now. There's a huge discount available as well.

[streakybacon]

I haven't seen The Apprentice IE but will give it a go for social skills. We use lots of tv and ds is quite good at working out other people's emotions, motives etc, but is still poor at identifying those things in himself .

For teens, have a look at Lie To Me - ds picked up loads from watching that.

Have you seen the Socially Speaking board game?

I made a lovely little card game for ds, where we had to roll a die and say different sentences in different tones of voice and volume. It was very effective .