"Pretty School"

Well, after a couple of weeks of meetings and evaluations and many months of therapy, we now know our next step. Emily will be going into the public school system to receive group speech therapy two times a week for an hour and a half at a time. Basically, she's going to a speech-oriented preschool, or "pretty school" as Emily calls it.

Last Thursday, I took Emily for an evaluation to see if she would qualify for school-based services. I was pretty confident that she would, as Andrew and I can still barely understand her many times. The speech therapist for the school administered several tests to determine Emily's receptive and expressive verbal and language skills. The results were not surprising.

On the receptive language portion (language Emily understands), she was amazing. She had to miss so many questions in a row to stop the test. Last week she was 2 years, 11 months old. We were somewhere in the 5 year old category on the test and she still had not missed enough questions to stop testing, but the therapist said she thought she knew enough. Needless to say, her receptive language skills, far from being a hindrance, are a very strong strength.

On the other hand, Emily's expressive language skills are lacking. While she clearly understands far more than her age would indicate, she is quite difficult to understand due to poor articulation and letter substitutions. For example, spoon is "foon", sparkle is "fartle" (that one cracks us up) and Veggie Tales are pronounced "Wedgie Tales"...again, I kind of like that one! Still, all this adds up to about 50% intelligibility overall. Now, this might not be such a problem, but with such a high receptive language ability, the frustration level at not being understood when she understands so much is quite high. So we continue with therapy.

Normally, Emily would receive this either in a preschool that the public school services or in private therapy once a week, but she was recommended for the other class that is typically for older kids because she did score so well on what she understood, plus it was obvious to the therapist that Miss Emily could probably hold her own with the older kids. (No doubt about that!) Plus, factor in the fact that she is the height of most of the kindergarteners there....and she'll be just fine.

We got to check out her classroom and find out all the drop-off/pick-up info and so now we just have to wait until Emily is officially three years old. Emily seemed to like her classroom...there was talk of a sand and water table and that was all Emily needed to convince her that this was the place to be! She's excited and I'm excited because that gives me a whole 3 hours a week to myself....which, for the last 3 years has been unheard-of. Whatever will I do?.....