PPCD stands for Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities. Its intention is to pick up where ECI--Early Childhood Intervention--leaves off at the age of 3 to try and get children with significant developmental delays caught up.
Having been diagnosed as having Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD--I have discovered that there are a ton of acronyms relating to this condition!), Gabriel meets the criteria, and their hope by accepting him is that he can get used to the structured school environment and the stresses that come along with public school like crowded hallways, many other children, lots of uncontrollable noise, bright lights, vibrant colors...in short, overstimulating environments. If he can get used to learning despite everything else going on in his head, then by first grade he may be able to attend "normal" classes with his peers.
The way they are doing this is by something they call "inclusion", where his class has activities such as PE and field trips with one to three other typical pre-school classes. The neurotypical children model what behavior is expected and gives Gabriel a taste of what a class with them would be like.
At the ARD (Admission, Review, and Dismissal) meeting earlier this month, we went over Gabriel's IEP (Individualized Education Plan). Warned you about the acronyms, didn't I? The IEP tells me what the teacher is hoping to get accomplished with Gabe by the end of the school year, the things they are going to be working on with him. Since everyone in his class range from age 3 to 5 with a variety of developmental or mental delays, they cannot all have the same goals, which is why it is individualized.
Gabriel's goals for this semester are:
*Staying in a designated spot and stay on task for increasing amounts of time
*Expressing his wants/needs using signs, pictures, or verbal exchange
*Completing cognitive/academic tasks such as matching, following one step commands, pointing to objects, and sorting
*Matching, pointing, and/or naming the colors red, blue, green, and yellow
*Counting objects using one-to-one correspondence from 1-10
*Matching, pointing, and/or naming the shapes circle, rectangle, square, and triangle
*Completing daily routine jobs like putting his backpack away, signing in at the beginning of the day, cleaning up after activities, etc
*Indicating the need to use the bathroom or that he needs to be changed
*Brushing his teeth
*Participating in parallel or cooperative play with peers in increasing amounts of time
*Interacting cooperatively in a group setting
*Cutting paper with scissors
*Tracing a vertical line, a horizontal line, a plus sign, and a circle
*Performing daily sensory activities using hands, mouth, and/or ears
Now, admittedly a lot of those are going to sound bizarre, or like it is not for the school to be teaching. Here's the thing you have to remember when thinking that: Gabriel is a very sensory-oriented child.
All children with autism are--it is one of the defining characteristics. They process sensory input in a way that greatly differs from the way that most people do, and it causes many daily activities to be unpleasant at best or painful at worst.
I am specifically referring in this case to the potty training and teeth brushing. My brother Jarrod can attest how awful brushing your teeth can be, as he cannot stand the sound it makes in his ears. It is much the same way with Gabriel. As these are two activities that are frequently problematic with special needs kids, PPCD works on them in conjunction with what the parents are doing at home so that the child can adapt to the sensation instead of avoiding it all together.
Other activities like tracing shapes and cutting with scissors are to help with hypotonia--where the fine muscle tone of the hands tend to be too weak to accomplish detailed movements such as grasping a pencil and pushing hard enough to leave a mark or squeezing scissors with enough force to cut through paper. By working these muscles, they improve his fine motor skills.
The others are fairly self-explanatory in that they are things that Gabriel is expected to be able to do because of his age but is unable to accomplish currently, such as peer-interaction, focus, and cognitive tasks such as color and shape recognition and sorting.
Gabriel is lucky in that he is quite intelligent. Of course, I cannot say this definitively as he is at this time unable to perform an IQ test due to a lack of communicative skills. When he is six, we are hoping that he has progressed to the point that he is able to complete this test--we would be testing for mental retardation, which no one is seeing indicators of at this time but has to be performed as MR and ASD sometimes go hand-in-hand. At the age of six, he will be reevaluated on his developmental level, to see if he is still testing as Autistic, and at that time we will likely test him for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) which he is certainly showing signs of but as with MR can be associated with ASD.
Yeah. Anyways.
The reason I bring all that up is that because he does appear so intelligent to me, to the experts, to anyone that spends time with him...because he is so smart, I expect he will thrive in this program.
I am not going to lie: it is going to be hard. It is hard on me, sending him when he is so very young and feels like my baby, and I still don't trust anyone to watch him as well as I can. But it is going to be even harder on him.
Don't get me wrong, he is going to have a ton of fun. He is going to have OT and Speech Therapy there, he's going to make friends, he's going to have people that understand him and like him just the way he is...
But they are going to push him to do things that make him uncomfortable, that are hard for him. It is going to be difficult. But it is going to be good for him. I have to admit that despite my apprehensions and my hesitancy, I know that it is the very best possible thing that we can do for him.
Blah blah blah, that was a lot of talk about the program, but you are probably more interested in Gabe and how he did.
He started on Wednesday; Michael and I dropped him off for his first day, which ended up being good since we then had to fill out a ton of enrollment paperwork. I don't understand how I had met with these people for the evaluation and the ARD and still had not been informed of enrollment or given the papers or anything. Of course, they likely assumed that I would have known about these things.
His class has eight other boys; no little girls. In the classroom, there is the teacher and two aides at all times with them, and then they also have the speech therapist, the occupational therapist and her assistant, and the physical therapist that come in. They go to classes like art and PE as well, and there are extra adults in there at that time. Basically, Gabe will never go unattended, which I am a big fan of. They serve breakfast, lunch, and snack in the classroom and they understand his limited dietary interest so the food they provide is more often than not things that he will enjoy. The campus is lovely--it really looks like a good school, in a good neighborhood, not too big, and everyone that works there have been wonderful. The playground is new and beautiful.
The first day was hard. They send home notes with the doctor's smiley-face guide to indicate how well he did. The first day was mostly frowns, accompanied by phrases such as "cried all morning", "wouldn't wear shoes", "didn't want to eat, wouldn't sleep". When he came home in the afternoon, he was so tired he barely made it up to the front door on his own steam. He wouldn't make eye contact,wouldn't hug me or let me hug him, wasn't making any babbling noises...
After about an hour on the swing, he started grunting and put his hand on my knee in acknowledgement that I was there.
The second day was much better. Gabriel woke up with less struggle or fight, and when he came home there were mostly positive notes and happy smiley faces. He still didn't nap and isn't eating much, but he is happier to be there and starting to bond with his teacher.
Friday morning, he was so excited to get to school that he woke up extra early--two hours early, to be precise. At four in the morning, he was bouncing on the couch and cackling, getting into the fridge, and generally wreaking havoc. He had a great day, even progressing to taking a half hour nap.
He is adapting. He is liking the routine, liking school.
We told Emerald that Gabe was going to "boy" school. It has caused a little stress; she is jealous. She has been having some tinkle accidents at home which we haven't had to worry about since basically November (maybe?). But she is appreciating the increased attention she is able to get at home. I am working on getting her ready for Kindergarten (though she will start preschool next semester, not kindergarten). Working on counting, reading, sorting, reasoning/problem solving--that sort of thing.
We have fun, too. We play board games like Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land. I paint her nails and she paints mine, we read a library of books, watch girly movies and shows, dance, cook and clean and play with Benjamin, go outside....it is a thousand times less pressure without Gabe here, even though we all miss him. He requires so much extra attention and monitoring, not to mention the therapies...it was draining trying to give all the kids what they needed, little less that extra mile of "fun".
Mommy being less stressed is having a positive effect on the house, I believe. When I am stressed, everyone is stressed. When I am not...it is a lot of pressure on me to be relaxed and cheerful when I don't particularly feel like it, so it is really nice to genuinely not feel as much pressure pushing down on me. It has also had a positive influence on my productivity as well.
Okay, so I have talked more than anyone is interested in reading, so I should quit stalling and go get to packing. We are going to Abilene Sunday for Gabriel's birthday--we are taking him to Veggie Tales Live!
Hope y'all have a great week!
--Andie--
No comments:
Post a Comment