Bye Bye, Jami

Since Anna was turning 3, she had to say goodbye to Jami, her speech teacher for the past four months. Friday was their last visit together. After their play/learning time, Anna gave her a card and we took photos. Later that morning, we met with folks from the school district about the results of Anna's language development retesting (done earlier this month). Anna has made such progress that she no longer qualifies for speech therapy. (Had she, it would have been provided by specialists from the school district.)

Her highest score came in Auditory Comprehension and Expressive Communication. Her weakness at this point is in the articulation category. For example, she might say "slite" instead of "slide." She omits final sounds such as t, ch, j and th in some words and sometimes reduces or substitutes blends. She may also distort the sounds of certain letters in some word positions. Still, most of her scores were right in the middle and even slightly higher in some categories, of the normal range for children her age. On the positive side, the speech therapist who tested Anna remarked on her attention span and specifically said that she sees children with fetal alcohol syndrome who can't pay attention (she was aware of the report of Anna's birth mother's drinking). Also, Anna willingly repeats her message if not understood, supports her emerging verbal skills with eye contact and inflection and follows multi-step directions.

We brought back pages and pages of handouts and tips on how we can help her to continue to improve. We can and will keep tabs on her progress with informal evaluations every six months. We were also told that her new school is very good about recognizing issues and making referrals. We're very proud of both Anna and Alexander and all the progress they've made.