"my" first IEP: Dyslexia Dysgraphia ADHD
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Anonymous
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Friends:
I'm reading up on the internet and am finding a lot of information. What I'd love are sample IEPs for this sort of configuration. I think I have found some good examples of dyslexia. I could use some better examples for dysgraphia (I have some) and for ADHD (I found a lot of accommodations but not so much goals; am I missing them?). I'd really like goals related to the confluence of all of these and related to slow processing speed specifically if that's a thing. Got some specific web links or other ideas? This is for 4th grade. Thank you. (I have looked at Understood and Wright's Law and some other sources but it takes a lot of looking to find sample PDFs of IEPs and in fact, I find them hard to find) |
Anonymous
| I’m a special education teacher. For adhd, the goals would be if there is a specific academic area that is behind because of the adhd, a goal for that deficit. Or often my students with adhd have goals for focus/attention (will attend during large/small group instruction for x minutes with fewer than X prompts), restating directions upon teacher request, coming to class with required materials x% of the time). Often for adhd when there is also LD the adhd is addressed on the IEP with accommodations such as repeated directions, visual supports and prompting for organization, the processing speed can be addressed through extended time for testing and small group test administration. For students who have dyslexia with a decoding deficit read aloud on all non-reading tests is common as well. For very low processing calculator accommodation can be given if the student qualifies according to state guidelines. |
Anonymous
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I don't know if you are going to find goals or accommodations for the combination -- and it also really depends on which issue is most affecting your child's ability to access the curriculum now.
I assume you have done a thorough evaluation -- what did the psychologist suggest? What problem is most pressing to remediate? Is your child's reading at grade level now? For dysgraphia accommodations often include the use of graphic organizers to plan writing -- and specialized instruction would include work with a specialist to learn how to utilize them. Some students with dysgraphia also benefit from the use of a keyboard instead of writing longhand and being allowed to circle answers on multiple choice tests rather than filling a scantron or bubble sheet. Use of audiobooks is typical for dyslexia but I've not seen that in school as early as 4th, but it's a great thing to start with at home. Here are more ideas for dysgraphia: http://www.ldonline.org/article/6202 Some dyslexia ideas for goals https://www.dyslexiatraininginstitute.org/pdfs/Website_HowtoWriteGoals.pdf |
Anonymous
| For my dyslexic Kid the focus was on getting him to use a keyboard...not much remediation. |
Anonymous
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Thank you. All helpful. I had not found those links.
We do have an evaluation and I'll look back at the psyc specific evaluation. We are teaching him keyboarding. We realize that this is just the reality of how he's going to write forever. That said, he needs to be able to jot a note. 
SpEd teacher: If a test is a math test (to judge level at the beginning or end of quarter) can those be given verbally? My DC fails them but when we ask verbally, he gets about 80% of the wrong answers correct so I'm wondering if he can just skip trying to do them himself and just move to verbal but not sure that's allowed. I don't care about the test's grade. I care about the teachers having time to teach him rather than determine if he's really at 50% or 80% of a math skill. If he's at 80 through a verbal score, I argue let's move on but agian, I'm not sure if that's allowed in the public school system. |
Anonymous
| OP again: Math not a problem at all (sans rapid math facts of course) |
Anonymous
Not the Special Ed teacher, but having a scribe is a standard accommodation for math or any other subject. The student would take tests or complete in-school assignments outside the classroom with a learning specialist who would write down whatever the student said to. This is helpful when math requires 'showing' one's work. For tests the learning specialist would need to be careful not to give any verbal or nonverbal indications that the answer is right or wrong. If needed it makes sense to ask for it but know that your child would likely be pulled out for testing. Scribes can push in for classwork or lessons. It is a time-intensive support, and many children hate being pulled out. So you need to have some evidence (from teachers, the psychologist doing the testing) that there is not another way for your child to demonstrate mastery of the content. Overall what has worked well for me is to be very clear about the challenges and provide evidence from actual school work, comments from teachers, and then as a team come up with accommodations that could help. |
Anonymous
| My DD has ADHD, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. The school offered a scribe (2nd grade) but she was very against it and we had the same concern about her needing to have the basic life skills like jotting a note. A year later we are happy with that choice. |
Anonymous
My DC has dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADHD also. He had several IEP goals in ES. One was based on reading progression. One was based on writing progression. One was based on increasing his self advocacy. His spelling goal was always to get it close enough for spell check to figure it out. His accommodations addressed the ADHD more. He had a reader and a scribe for all assessments. He received audio books for his classwork that was at his cognitive level not his reading level. He had OT, but it was minimal and never really progressed. Having him work on his keyboarding 20-30 minutes a day in the summer worked better. We did in the summer so that he was not overloaded during the school year. At home all year he worked on reading at the two different levels. One was remediation and one was using audio books for book reports and other language arts homework that was at his cognitive level. He went to reader tutor that was certified and experienced in all levels of Wilson. He also received Wilson at school. He has a rather profound form of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Dyslexia: He had trouble with decoding and phoneme awareness and Wilson was great at that. By 8th grade he was finally in the low average range for both of those (25t and 35th percentiles- coming from the single digits). He also has trouble with RAN (random automatized naming) and there isn't really anything out there that helps with that. He is still in the 1st percentile for that. He also still has trouble with rate, accuracy and fluency as a result. He had trouble acquiring his math facts and once acquired has slow recall. As a result he had had a calculator accommodation since Middle School. Audio books have been crucial to his ability to access the curriculum and continue to grow in vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension. When he went to Middle School,he started using Kurzweil and still does today in college. It is what he is most familiar- there have been a boatload of new text to speech programs that I am sure your DC will find and use - google, apple, Microsoft- all have their versions. Dysgraphia- he has two forms of dysgraphia. The first is motor integration and the only thing that has helped is getting better on the keyboard and using word prediction software. The second relates to how he organizes his thoughts and gets them down on paper. Graphic organizers did well here. He is now in college and still uses them. He also had use of clip art as an accommodation for projects that required drawing. ADHD: Since he had a scribe and reader for his assessment, he was already in a quieter place with only the scribe/reader and himself so he did not have a quieter location to take tests as an accommodation. He had frequent breaks though. He had preferential seating in the classroom (near the front, but near a plug for his laptop) and extra time. Extra time was important because it just takes longer to take tests with a scribe and reader as everything has to go through two brains. He had the same accommodations for the SOL tests and for the College Board tests (including APs) in HS (scribe/reader/extra time). He is now in his second year of college and doing very well. It is a long slow slog and small steps add up over time. Don't try to do too much at once., just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I took some of the wrightslaw classes and found them to be very helpful in the IEP arena. Good luck and I can answer any specific questions too. |
Anonymous
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Hey: Thanks! Two quick questions for the immediate PP.
Why do you think keyboarding during the school year was too much? We do it a few times a week and I was thinking of increasing it. Also, do you remember when your kids start needing school text books in audio form? So far we've been using NOVA to improve knowledge of science and social studies. |
Anonymous
At that time, DC went to a reading tutor after school 2-3 times a week and we worked at home on remediation on the other days. Every day. Plus he "ear read" books at his cognitive level at least 30 minutes a day. Plus, he had his regular homework. He usually scribed to me and then would retype it for practice if there was enough time. Adding 20 minutes of typing practice to that was too much for him. He also did a sport at that time. He really needed down time and still does. We found that he could really improve typing in the summer and it would last during the year. One trick I learned was for me to take the speed test at the end of a level- otherwise he would have never progressed to the next levels. He is a slow typist but it is fast enough for him to work- he says he can type as fast as his brain thinks- so he is reluctant to use the speech to text programs. He listened to books from the get go. Mostly we got books from Learning Ally and the Arlington General Library (it has the best collection of books on CDs in their children's area). He was in a pullout for Language Arts where they worked mainly on the writing and reading remediation, so he would listen to other books at home and write book reports at home to make up for lost instruction in a regular curriculum. This helped him keeping moving along books as there were increasing complexities of characters and plot structures that just were not available at his reading level. As I mentioned in my previous post, it also helped with his vocabulary, background knowledge and comprehension. IN 4th-6th grade we mined the Newberry book Awards and Honors list quite a bit. They are available more often in audio form and he liked quite a few of them. He also got caught in up the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series. Rick Riordan is great as his characters have ADHD and dyslexia. We can all recite the first few books of Harry Potter because we listened to them so much- we have the American and British versions.
We also read to him tons of books- until we were hoarse. He loved non-fiction and those were harder to find in audio versions. Ginger (real) and lemon tea with honey helps! As I said in my previous post, he got books from Learning Ally, but as he progressed through school, Virginia AIM (in HS) and Bookshare had the higher level textbooks. If no one has it, his college has a machine that will take a book and scan it into the PDF and his Kurzweil can read it. That is cumbersome, and time taking, but it works. He ended up preferring his chose computer voice in Bookshare or Kurzweil to a human reader. This was true especially with fiction books as a human reader is like an actor and you hear the book through their interpretation. One trick I learned when he was reluctant to start a new book, we to put it into the CD player in the car when we were going out for more than 20 minutes. Then he would be hooked. |
Anonymous
How did you son get over the "embarrassment" of having a scribe/reader? I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about but my DD does and doesn't want it even though it would help her a lot. She's in 6th and will really need it in MS and HS but she doesn't want to stand out. |
Anonymous
What is this? Link? |
Anonymous
Fortunately, he never really had any. He was diagnosed in 2nd grade and so many kids were getting pulled out for this or that. He was pulled out for language arts and math. Language Arts for special ed and math for enrichment. Plus, he was so relieved by the diagnosis that he just would tell people matter of factly, 'I have dyslexia." if anyone questioned it. I think it was just habit by the time he came to an age where he might have been embarrassed by it. That is not to say it was easy, he had other challenges. |
Anonymous
Nova...like PBS style. Here's an example we used last year: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/explore-ancient-egypt.html |