Week Four

Crystal decided to consult different Down syndrome specialists to see if it was a good idea to continue her inclusion in the regular classroom, while spending part of the day in the special education classroom or if she should spend all day in the special education classroom and work intensely on her therapy. Many of the specialists thought it would be very beneficial for Katie to continue her path of being mainstreamed in the classroom with a teacher’s aide available for assistance. The specialists explained that there are many benefits for Katie to be mainstreamed. For example, Katie can learn through her other peers (by imitation), she will learn what is socially appropriate and life skills, and will help her develop friendships. This will help Katie’s development in school, social settings, and emotionally. This really convinced Crystal that this was the best route to take. Her main goal for Katie is to be able to increase her development in all areas and to be as successful as possible.

                Crystal is continuing to work towards becoming a licensed cosmetologist. This has really brought joy to Crystal’s life. She feels that she is being proactive about her life and she feels that she has really found something that she enjoys doing. While in the past year she seemed to be struggling emotionally, she now feels that she has a better mindset. A lot of that has been a result of her friends helping her with Katie when she is taking classes. In addition, Katie has become good friends with a girl named Lexi. Lexi also had Down syndrome and they became friends in their special education classroom. This has really helped Katie, socially. Crystal is also very excited about the new friendship because she no longer fears that Katie will not be able to make friends, in addition, she has become very good friends with Lexi’s mom, Mary. Crystal and Mary have been able to talk with each other about their daughter’s struggles and have been able to help each other through that. To have someone who is in the same situation at Crystal is very comforting for her.            

                Crystal convinced Mary that she should sign Lexi up for the gymnastics class as well. Both of the girls really have enjoyed taking the class. As Katie’s therapists said, this would really help her with learning about personal space. Katie’s therapists were able to talk with Katie’s gymnastics instructor about how they are teaching her about appropriate social behaviors and about personal space and her instructor was going to try to focus on these skills with Katie. Through various exercises and group stretching she taught Katie to always stand an arm’s length away from the person next to you or beside you. She has been able to carry this skill into the classroom and at some points on the playground. Although, it is a work in progress. However, we are still seeing improvements. In addition, the exercise and stretching has really helped Katie, physically. She is no longer considered over-weight for her age. It has helped that she has been growing on average of 1.5-2 inches since her 8^th birthday!

                By the end of 3^rd grade, there was a tremendous amount of improvements Katie had made. However, there was also a lot of things Katie needed to continue to work on. As she was about to enter 4^th grade, Katie’s IEP team discussed the past year’s successes and things she needed to work towards. They discussed, that Katie seemed to still be in pre-operational stage of development while her peers were in a concrete operation. Katie’s wasn’t able to have a realistic understanding of the world and couldn’t seem to reason about concrete objects. In addition, she is unable to think abstractly. The school psychologist and reading specialist discussed that this was typical of children with Down syndrome; however it is important to start to work on different skills for her to learn to think abstractly and for her to realize the different aspects about the world around her. This could be done by continuing to scaffold. Katie’s IEP team discussed how they need to continue to intensively scaffold her study skills by using rehearsing and organization skills. This came up as a huge problem Katie seemed to be developing. Katie did not have the skills to selectively attend to specific assignments or exams. During spelling tests, Katie would be overwhelmed by the amount of words on the page when she only needed to know 10 of the 20. They decided to put stars by the ones Katie needed to know and to make individual notecards of each word so that she was able to selectively attend to the one word at a time.

                While most kids went through a growth spurt of vocabulary, Katie’s growth spurt was not as large. She learned new words, but not as many as peers. This resulted in difficulty with learning to read. During third grade, Katie was still learning to read, while her peers were reading to learn the material. This resulted in a difficult task for Katie’s IEP team. They needed to develop ways that Katie was able to take in the information and understand it and still learn to read. Luckily all of this was done in a way that was very exciting for Katie. While Katie went to her reading specialist to continue to work on reading, she would then get to use her “pretend” play to help her understand what she read. Katie would learn to read the story or poem the kids were reading in class, then her and Lexi would go and play with the dolls and they would use the ideas and concepts from the story in their pretend play. The IEP team came up with this idea, and it was very successful. This also was a great way for her to strengthen her social skills and work on appropriately conversing with others. In addition, Crystal told the IEP team that Katie loved movies. She watches movies over and over again and will know all of the lines in the movie. They are trying to use this as a learning mechanism for Katie’s development in speech and reading.

                As fourth grade begins, Katie’s IEP team gets together to talk about continuing to develop Katie’s zone of proximal development and to develop her goals for this year. They are happy with the progress Katie has made in the past year and want to continue to find different therapy approaches that will be beneficial to Katie. Crystal said that she has seen a great amount of development and Katie has really blossomed. However, one of Crystal’s concerns was bullying. 4^th and 5^th grade seem to be when bullying starts to become a huge problem, and Katie has had to deal with some judgmental girls and boys making fun of the way she looks. Emotionally, this has been very difficult for Crystal to see Katie upset. She loves her classmates and wants people to like her too. The school has developed new bullying approaches that hopefully will be beneficial to Katie in the upcoming years.

                During fourth grade, Katie has had to learn to communicate orally. A great deal of assignments, have been discussion based which often caused a problem for Katie. She has difficulty fully grasping the question and isn’t quick enough to gather a response. In addition, she has difficulty understand what she learned. The IEP team decided they want her to be able to eventually do this. They have the teacher write out the discussion questions and Katie takes them to the special education classroom where they give her skills to help her come up with answers and help her look for key words in the question to help her phrase the answers appropriately. Katie’s speech is intelligible however an issue they tend to run into is she is unable to put stories, ideas, and concepts together clearly. She often inserts irrelevant detail making her story very long and unclear. This has been something that has pushed kids away from her because they say she “doesn’t make any sense.” Katie’s speech pathologist suggests working on her narrative skills. In addition, Katie still has trouble classifying different parts of speech and language and is still struggling with categorization. This also has resulted in her difficulty with semantics and syntax. This is something her speech and language pathologist wants to start working towards in therapy. The better she understand the words, the better she can form her thoughts and her sentences.

                By the end of 4^th grade, Katie’s peers were able to write in cursive. However, Katie has just learned to write correctly print her letters. Katie and her OT are working towards cursive and learning the flow of correctly producing each letter in cursive.  Giving Katie extra time, less questions, and less options on tests and homework have really made her be successful in some of her classes in 4^th grade. She is learning about different factors, fraction and geometry configurations in math and seems to be doing relatively well with these concepts. In addition, she is enjoying learning about space in her science class. She often pretends she is an astronaut when her and Lexi are playing. The one issue she seems to continue to have is she has a hard time communicating in all settings and has a hard time collaborating with others. These are goals she will continue to work on in 5^th grade.

                As Katie enters 5^th grade, she is continuing to develop. Physically she is at the same level as all of the kids her age. Socially she has made huge improvements but is still struggling with the bullying. This continues to worry Crystal. She feels she needs to do something about it and fears it will interfere with Katie’s social development. Katie seems to be very happy, though. One of her favorite things to do is watch all of the Shrek movies with Lexi and practice their gymnastics at each other’s houses. Crystal finished her classes as a cosmetologist and instantly got a job at a local salon. A lot of the kids in Katie’s class and their mom’s go to Katie to get their hair and nails done, and this has really helped Crystal and Katie financially. They are at a much better place and Crystal seems to really be enjoying what she is doing. Mary even suggests that when she gets to a good place financially she should consider opening up her own salon!

Decision point: Does Crystal talk to the guidance counselor about the bullying Katie has been enduring and try to resolve it or does Crystal give it more time to see if it starts to affect Katie in her social development?

Questions:

1.       What is scaffolding?

2.       What is zone of proximal development?

3.       Is it common for children with Down syndrome to victims of bullying?

4.       What are some benefits of having a teacher’s aide in the mainstreamed classroom with Katie?