My son diagnosed with apraxia now

[happycc]

So my 4yrs old son was diagnosed with autism by Kaiser at age 2 ish. Now he has been diagnosed with apraxia by Northern California Diagnostics Center. His AB team says he has both. 

 

Anyways the school districts all push for him to go to Prek and regular school. 

 

But I still want to homeschool him since I have others homeschooling at home. I started going on Apraxia listservs and asked a lot of questions regarding reading...

 

Suggestions:

Lively Letters

LiPS

HWT

 

Anyone tried Lively Letters?

 

[PeterPan]

Is he getting ABA at home? My ds has dyslexia, in addition to the ASD and apraxia, and for him the dyslexia was very, very obvious even at that age. Like they won't diagnose it, but by 5, sure, it's obvious. Now the IDA is saying to get it diagnosed before 1st grade, meaning 6 is fine. At ages 4 and 5 you're noticing things like issues with rhyming, not understanding letter sounds connecting to letters, not being able to glue/unglue words.

 

Not all kids with apraxia have dyslexia or even mild phonological processing issues. Like some really just DON'T. Maybe your ds will be in the don't! If he does, doing intensive intervention makes the dyslexia all the harder to diagnose, which delays you getting helpful support and access and paper trail. They might even just blame everything on the ASD for a while and say weird things happen.

 

So my personal opinion is do a normal preschool, letter of the week, normal kind of stuff curriculum with him. I did the MFW K5 with ds, and that's fine, same idea. Do hands-on stuff and kinesthetic stuff if he's a hands-on learner. But as far as like LIPS? Well it's vital if you need it, sure. But I'm just saying upfront it *will* delay your SLD Reading diagnosis if SLD Reading is going on. The amount they ahve to cover is very small to be within range, so you'd cover it, raise those test scores, and then have to re-eval later.

 

So me, I would do normal things, focusing on his best learning modalities (kinesthetic, whatever), and be ALL IN on your behavior work and speech therapy. Work on behavior and speech therapy, and work on academics only to the extent that they slide in.

 

I really liked the MFW preschool activity cards at that age. You can't go wrong with them. Any kind of normal math will do. Again, I got burnt there because I did Ronit Bird (meant for dsycalculia) and the first psych didn't want to diagnose. The next two psychs saw the SLD math plain as day 6 months later. It's just that with RB I had remediated it *just enough* that they were like what's the gripe? I'm like I KNOW this isn't normal. Well with a bit more time, that became obvious again. His peers pulled ahead, his scores dropped, and the disability was showing again. 

 

If there's no dyslexia, AAS pre is awfully cute. I don't know anything about Lively Letters. I think you'll want to roll with how he learns best. My ds is very kinesthetic, so I had a book of motion activities to go with every letter. It came from the education store, so like for P it gave 4 steps to be a pretzel, that kind of thing. So you're working on compliance, auditory processing, and a bit of normal letter awareness. We also really liked the jumbo bananagrams.

 

They may bring some beginning school skills into his ABA time, so you might just let them roll with it on the writing. My ds not only has SLD writing but has just been a couple years behind. And where his fine motor skills *were* ahead, they totally stopped when we began intensive therapy for the apraxia. So if you change his mix, handwriting might be hard for him or might not be timely. I would focus on coloring and scissor skills, personally. Some simple origami/paper folding can be fun. Mazes are AWESOME. Dot to dots.

[Lots of boys]

My DS3 has Apraxia, ASD, and dyslexia as well. For us, we have really found Dancing Bears (implemented very, very slowly) to work well for reading/phonics.

 

We also use CLE math and really like it for the repetition and incremental approach.

[Crimson Wife]

 

But I still want to homeschool him since I have others homeschooling at home.

 

Saying this gently, but this isn't a good reason to HS a SN child. You should only HS him if you think you can provide him a better education than what you can get through the PS or a district-funded private placement. Each child has different needs and don't let yourself get so wrapped up in trying to make things exactly the same for all your kids that you wind up hurting one of them.

 

I am not saying that you should put your SN child into a classroom-based placement. I don't know what the options you have available are like. They may be terrible. I'm only saying that the fact you are HSing your other kids should not play into your decision at all.

[happycc]

Crimson Wife: yes I understand what you are saying but as someone who has been in the education field I am not excited by anything that I have seen. 

I have had kids in ps and things were bad. My older kids still have not recovered because of the schools. 

[PeterPan]

Saying this gently, but this isn't a good reason to HS a SN child. You should only HS him if you think you can provide him a better education than what you can get through the PS or a district-funded private placement. Each child has different needs and don't let yourself get so wrapped up in trying to make things exactly the same for all your kids that you wind up hurting one of them.

 

I am not saying that you should put your SN child into a classroom-based placement. I don't know what the options you have available are like. They may be terrible. I'm only saying that the fact you are HSing your other kids should not play into your decision at all.

 

 

Crimson Wife: yes I understand what you are saying but as someone who has been in the education field I am not excited by anything that I have seen. 

I have had kids in ps and things were bad. My older kids still have not recovered because of the schools. 

My ds is 8 now, and I think I get now why Crimson is saying what she's saying. She means well and she's right, unfortunately. Your kids were traumatized at school, but now are they going to be traumatized at home? How is his behavior? He's going to get ABA? You'll have funding?

 

I suppose there are people whose kids with ASD are just like totally stellar to work with. I only know my own situation. I can tell you I sent away my dd this semester, and in large part it's because of my ds. It's very, very, very ugly and challenging right now. Oh he's a joy and all that junk. I'm just saying Crimson is right that it's very possible that your hopes about how it will turn out will be unrealistic. If you have a large number of kids at home, maybe you'll be able to buddy and create tons of structure. Maybe it will actually work. Or maybe it will leave him with swaths of time where he's not getting input. In homeschooling people laud that and call it masterful play. Fine for NT kids, but with autism all it does it promote withdrawal. 

 

It just isn't realistic for Mom to be on ALL the time. And your other dc might resent after a while being caught in the middle of behavioral struggles, compliance challenges, etc. And maybe someone has a formula I don't, or maybe in their house those things aren't an issue. 

 

I think the challenge is getting honest about the degree of need the dc has. It's easy to *under-estimate* the amount of input the dc needs. My ds' needs, what he really, HONEST TO GOD NEEDS, is overwhelming. He needs an adult, someone of mature age, who is ON mentally, ready to interact, work, interact with him in a safe way, and meet somewhat of his intellectual and social/behavioral needs, about 7 hours a day. If I can provide that, then I can outsource with classes at the Y another 1-3 hours and pawn him off on a parent, sibling, or aunt for the remaining couple hours that evening that we weren't in class and be ok. But that 7 hours a day, honestly it's non-negotiable. If I want ok behavior, compliance, stability, that's the interaction he HAS to have.

 

So there is no "Oh yeah I homeschool my dozen other kids and in-between I see him in little chunks and do his stuff." That would not meet my ds' needs. We tried. So I sent my dd away to make sure HER needs were being met as well. Because by the time Mama meets enough of the hours for the ASD dc, ain't nothing else happening. Ain't no cooking, no cleaning, no teen talking, nothing. So I got a Roomba and my dh does the kitchen and I sent my dd away. I could have sent my ds to school, but I sent my dd away. We make choices. She's happy. She's back for the weekend to do an interview and then she'll fly out again. We had to make a choice, and that was our choice.

 

I get in-home help, because my body is kinda mortal. I'm adding another worker this month, which will, as we ramp it up, almost DOUBLE the hours of in-home help I have. My ds is THAT intense. I have no clue, no clue what your ds is like. I'm just saying my ds is so intense that it's astonishing. And my people do what I give them! My new worker will do Ronit Bird math and Family Math. She's doing SOTW activities with him. They do lots of logic games and fun sheets and play with toys and imaginative play. They have an awesome time! But can *I* be that awesome all the time? No, I'm mortal. I need to pay bills. I kind of get frazzled after a while and then I snap. 

 

So when Crimson says what she's saying, she's just being realistic. She and I are using different ways, but we're going at it with the same GOAL. We're making sure that SOMEONE is putting into our kids the number of hours it takes, realistically, to keep them on track and meet their needs. And it wasn't some theory in a book or something to line a therapist's pockets. I can SEE the improvement when my ds gets that amount of interaction. And the improvement is so strong, it's like sign us up, get us more!