How Does One Spell Progress?

Summer is winding down. Le Sigh.

Soon, B will begin yet another change – going to a new ECSE school and staying at his aftercare. I’ve been back and forth with the various parties involved – hopefully I can get him placed in an ECSE program near our home and his aftercare. You know, one that won’t require an 1 1/2 hour bus ride in the mornings. 🙂

I’m also working to see if he can get into an after-school  program. Because quite frankly, our work schedules have been affected. We need to get B somewhere where we can pick him up at a relatively normal time versus the 3:30PM we have been doing.

But that’s all being worked out as we speak. I hope.

This morning, I met with B’s Program Director. This is the same school that he attended after his ECSE morning session – he went full-time during this summer. I wasn’t sure what to expect from our first parent-teacher conference, but have to say I was happy to hear that he is doing well.

The school performed a VB-MAPP (Verbal Behavior – Milestone Assessment and Placement Program) assessment. The VB-MAPP, developed by Dr. Mark Sundberg, is based on B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior, typical language milestones, and field-test data.

See Related: Dr. Mark Sundberg’s VB-MAPP

There are three developmental areas and 16 different skill areas. Overall, the Program Director said that B is right around where he should be. In many aspects, he is solidly in Level 3 (30-48 months). However, there are some areas that he scored Level 2 (18-30 months). I was assured that it’s normal for something like that to occur, since there are about 170 verbal behavior milestones involved. Ideally, the goal would be that by Kindergarten he would be in Level 3 completely.

For example – he still speaks about himself in the third person (the “Bob Dole Effect” or Illeism). He also confuses he/she, him/her, and so forth. In addition, B also needs encouragement to ask for help from his buddies and cooperating with them.

But there is a lot of progress. He has gotten better about better verbalizing his requests (like, “I want some milk”) and is able to sit at his group snack/lunch table without negative behavior. That last part is HUGE for us, as it gives us hope that this behavior will continue.

He’s also much better about writing, though he likes to add on a extra letter or five to his name. But speaking of writing, last night he was asking me for words so that he could practice on a magnetic writing board. At first he just wrote a bunch of letters – I would say “APPLE” and it was “AJMR”. But then I wrote out “BALL” for him to try out. And, behold, he did that just that! Husband and I were impressed, to say the least. It was a great magic moment.

Who cares if he mixed up his upper and lowercase letters? It’s a legible word!