Pecs

After our interview with the primary school (which included the area school support coordinator and our EI special ed teacher) it was decided to investigate assisting Hannah's communication with a visual system. I spoke with her ST and we are now using pictures from PECS to help increase Hannah's utterance length and to encourage her to attempt more words - using the pictures to assist the listener understand just what word she is saying if her clarity is not adequate.

Today I am home with Kit who is sick -so I got the laminator out and put some thought into next week's kindy orientation. I have met the kindy teachers but haven't actually spoken to them specifically about Hannah. According to the letter - the kindy teachers take the children for 'activities' and the principal takes the parents - no doubt for a good 'talking to!"!!! lol.

So - Hannah has a keychain tag that she can put through the loophole of her jeans - she has it for preschool but I doubt that she uses it much - she can manage the communications on it without using the visuals or for some like 'Can I play' really needs an adult to help her use it with her peers - or it just wouldn't be used. Anyhow I think that it is a good idea and perhaps a new start in a kindy with some aid time might revive it - so I added a few visuals - My name is Hannah, sad, happy, tired, I like and I don't like. I hope it is enough to get her started at orientation.

I also did some more pics that might be useful like toilet routine, assembly, school bag, body bits, shapes, and a few others. They go in a homeade pecs book - I will wait and chat to the teachers though before I give that one to Hannah to use - it is more a tool for them to govern the use of but I must say that the sentence strip idea is really helping.

Time to put up some sightwords around the house too. After that I want to work on a Hannah Profile -a one page summary of just what she can do at the moment and any 'this works...' type of stuff so the teachers have an overview. I also have a letter explaining DS that I gave the preschool teacher with the view that if we felt it necessary it could be given to the parents too - it wasn't necessary - I think cos the kids were all a bit young. Still if she is going to be the only child in the school with DS I might revisit it and have a copy ready for the teachers - to use if need be. Any ideas on how to distribute such a letter if we do decide to use it?? It is basically an "I'm the same as you but learn some things more slowly ' type of letter and on the back were a few 'common myths' Q and A material I got from DSAssociation including what I think is a subtle lesson not to refer to her as a 'downs'. First some afternoon tea though.