Don’t mind my bragging

By Melissa, on November 5th, 2008

Sometimes we’re almost brilliant, if I do say so myself. Check this out…

Back story: Last year we had zero worthwhile communication with Monkey’s teacher. Every child received the same handout (no individual comments) and we received the verbal “he had a good/great/challenging day” reports and the cute stories but when it came time to sit down last June to hear reports we realized we had not been given anything worthwhile all year! According to the daily verbal reports he was the model student but when we had to meet to discuss placement for this year suddenly he needed to be in a substantially separate classroom, he was not progressing in his placement. We were not happy with this for obvious reasons and we decided it would not happen again.

So…we developed, along with our advocate, a communication sheet. Monkey’s new teacher filled in the schedule and the school behaviorist defined the numbering scheme. It ended up looking like this:

communicationplan

Pretty nifty, no? But wait! It gets better. We finally sat down with Excel on Monday night and plugged in all the numbers and we used the charting tool to come up with line graphs for both regulation and participation.

Regulation:

Participation:

Cool, eh? Already we can see that Monkey’s regulation (and thus participation) are falling off drastically after snack and not rebounding until playground. We’re asking the teacher to work with the OT to put in some sort of intervention in the book/group work area to try to even out the drop. His art time have been improving a great deal over the last few days so we’ll hold off there and see how that shapes up.

We NEVER could have done this last year. I am so pleased with how this is working out!