Anyone a speech/language pathologist?

[Sneezykids]

My ds who is 6.5 yo, has been in ps for two months, coming from homeschooling. Conferences were last night and the teacher is concerned about a language issue. He had an IEP for two years in preschool for S/L but was dismissed.

What I've suspected for the last two years is now being noticed by someone else! I have noticed ds doesn't process well and has problems with expressive language. This also seems to be related to him having some social troubles too at school.

I gave the go ahead to get him evaluated by a SL path. If he qualifies he'll go to speech class a few times a week.

I'm wondering what he'll do there. AND if they sense something else will they do further testing? I suspect he is very high funtioning autism because he has so many allergies and so many of those symtoms overlap with ASD.

[Momily]

I'm not a speech path but a special educator, but I work pretty closely with our SLP so I can try and answer your questions.

As far as what they do -- it depends on the area of the goals. I have kids with articulation goals, and they might spend their therapy time looking in the mirror and practicing saying a new sound with their tongue in the right place, and then playing a fun board game, and after each turn drawing several cards with pictures on them and saying those words. I have kids with vocabulary goals who might do activities where they follow directions with words like in, under, on, before, after etc . . . I have kids with language formulation goals who might listen to a story and practice retelling it, and I hav kids with social-pragmatic goals who might get in class coaching when they're working with peers on a cooperative task, or might work on role playing social situations in the therapy room. As the kids get older there's often an academic component to the work they do, so they'll work on organizing their thoughts into sentences, and then on getting them down on paper -- with the 5 to 7 year olds there's less of that. Almost all of my kids like Speech, although some of that is the personality of the SLP. I know there are SLP's that click with certain kids and some that don't -- ours seems to click with almost everyone and most kids love having his time and attention.

As to the testing, each individual kind of testing requires a separate Evaluation Plan that you need to sign off on, so if they see things that raise red flags for them in other areas they can certainly ask to convene another meeting to discuss testing him, but they can't just do it without you consent.

[Sneezykids]

Thanks. The teacher suspects a receptive language gap and possibly an expressive one too. She said the kids get mad and frustrated at him but she isn't certain why, he's only been there two months so she's still trying to figure it out. I've always had a gut feeling about all of this, even after they dismissed him from his preschool IEP.

His teacher thinks his social issues may be related to a language delay, OR it could be he is still adjusting to being in a school environment. But, again, my gut and experience with him even homeschooling tell me something is going on. He didn't do well in groups either when HS'ing.

Yes, she said most kids love the SLP too. Thanks again!