We finally get all the paper work completed for his “big” Evaluation with Damien Korb and dropped in at the centre to be sure they received it.  Within 10 minutes I receive a call to schedule an appointment, wow great news hopefully this will be the final piece in the puzzle to get the CPT code so that we can get help from the insurance company.  The date is set so fingers crossed.

Slight change to schedule this week.  Elliot has a field trip in the morning so we schedule the OT and SLT for after the trip in the afternoon.  Elliot is very excited to be going to see his therapists he really seems to be enjoying his sessions.  He takes great pleasure telling Miss Joyce that he had been sick in his bed at the weekend and proceeds to show her his buzz lightyear plaster also.  What difference a few sessions make he is very chatty compared to other sessions and warms up really quickly to Joyce.  She seems to have really tuned into what Elliot likes already and sets up a bucket swing for Elliot and they pretend that he is buzz lightyear.  He loves this idea and as he is swinging backwards and forwards he is given lots of different types of balls to get into the net on the wall.  After this another exercise to improve his balance and co-ordination, having him climb ladders and pretending to be in a castle so he can jump down again.  Which of course he thinks is great as he loves jumping.  As with other sessions he is nicely warmed up for his SLT sessions especially after the squishes Joyce gives him.

We now head to SLT with Miss Christie.   We recap from next week and discuss phonetics and letters of the alphabet.  It is difficult to be clear exactly what issues Elliot has with his speech as I spend so much time with him that I don’t always notice something right under my nose.  So I would agree it is far to say that the Speech and Language sessions are as much of a learning curve for me as Elliot.  It seems a lot of Elliots problems are not that he doesn’t know what to say there is just too much to say and he is struggling to access all the words together.  SO for instance when you ask him what he has done at school he wont really answer.  Miss Christie introduces us to a method of helping him access the information and get talking.  I guess it is a little like a mind map we start at the beginning of the day or a time when we know he is more receptive to sharing information with and draw pictures and work from there.  Also it starts to become more apparent that I am really not helping Elliot by finishing sentences for him or accepting a request with it being spoken correctly.  An example of this would be if he just points at something and says please.  Rather than accepting this I make him ask for what he wants.  If he isn’t very clear with his words I help him pronounce them and encourage him to describe things to me as well.  We go home with a few exercises to help Elliot strengthen his tongue again say L’s and words ending in LL