School Starts in a Month...

I was just surfing around on the internet, and I found this article written by Victoria Irizarry Romanienko, for Moms of children with IEP's and 504 plans. Victoria is the mother of an 11 year old with PDD-NOS, ASD as well as being a Special Needs Advocate having attended over 230 IEPs meetings. 

Don't know what an IEP or 504 is?  Be grateful... these are plans or programs that help ensure that children with disabilities have access to the educational programs and opportunities that they need.  There are a lot of children with these kinds of plans.  

If YOUR child has one of these plans, here is the article with a lot of helpful suggestions:

 

School starts in a month and you will want to plan to dust off those documents and make sure everything is in order. 

I suggest you write a letter to each of your child's teachers highlighting the pertinent points of the IEP including specific modifications and including specifics about your child's abilities and areas of weakness. I send that letter with my son on the first day of school every year along with a copy of his current IEP. While, according to the law, your child's teachers should already have read each child's IEP by the first day of school, the likely hood that they had an opportunity to read it thoroughly is slight. 

Get ready for the new year and help your child look at going back to school in September as a positive experience. Remember our children feed off of our attitudes towards things. So as an example, while you may have hesitations about their attending middle school, you must not let them be aware of your worries. 

That doesn't mean that you should not talk about the possible negative experiences, in fact make sure you do, but be sure to pair those possible negative situations with possible solutions so your child can learn how to react to them in a positive, productive way. Role play with them - help them work through their fears. Purchase a lock (for their locker if it's new to them) and have them practice with it to learn the technique of left right left, etc. 

Find free worksheets in math and reading and writing online and have them practice those skills once a day this month, this makes the transition back to school a little more smooth. The store 5 Below has awesome workbooks on grade level that have a sheet a day plus fun stuff for kids. Always keeping in mind that a genius can learn a new task or skill, well enough to teach it to another or to do it without thinking about it, by repeating it approximately 5 – 15 times while the average person may need 50 – 150 times and a child with a disability may take 150 – 1500 or even l5,000 repetitions before they are able to learn a new task or skill well. 

Many of us just got out of PACEmode (PACE is the name of my district's extended school year program) and I know we all need a nice long break, but we also need to help prepare our children for September because we all know how quickly our summer flies by...  --Victoria Irizarry Romanienko