Today's craziness

Tori's class has been reading The Wizard of Oz. The idea was to read the book and then watch the movie and see how different they were. They also learned that a book usually has more to it then the movie. For watching the movie they were supposed to dress up like their favorite character. Tori wanted to dress up as Toto..............Uh-huh........

So here is my interpretation of Toto. Notice the lovely green glasses for being in the Emerald City. We also found some flowers that resembled poppies so I went to town with those.

I didn't want to have her wear a collar and leash like she wanted to, so I got her a bandana and wrote TOTO on the bottom. It worked.Then we wove her hair with the remaining "poppies". She has so much hair!!!

Then later this morning I had to attend the girls IEP conferences. If you don't know what that is, it's an Individualized Educational Plan. My sister Kristen watched Jason for me and Samantha got to sit for two of them. First we discussed Tori, and our concerns for her. Miss Palmer came to the conference and Marcia, the vision teacher and IEP fasilitator, ran through everything that Tori will need in the classroom. Since Tori can see ok, there wasn't much to worry about. She just needs to be within 10 ft. of the whiteboard, her papers need to be crisp clean copies, instructions written on the board need to be in print and not cursive. We also discussed that fact that she might struggle with "bubble tests". I told them not to make any changes with this as of yet because I want to see if this is a concern, but I have been told that they could prove difficult in the future. So I've advised them that if she takes a bubble test and it shows a lot of wrong answers to let me know, and then to check to see if this is an accurate representation of what she knows.Marcia did some testing prior to the IEP and she has determined that Tori has some fine depth perception problems, and she has some contrast problems. That would be helped a lot from print and not cursive as well as the clean copies. Obviously sitting in the front of the class is going to be an ongoing need for Tori, not surprising. The one thing she told me that concerned me a little is that Tori's hearing test in one of her ears had to be taken up to 30 DB's. I don't know if she just had a cold or if something more is going on with her. We'll have to do some more testing on her at her next well-check and see if the findings are the same. The loss wasn't bad enough for us to jump on anything as of yet. Tori will be taking Braille classes 4 days a week for 30 minutes a day.

Then it was Samantha's turn. One of the only nice things with the girls is that once one IEP is done both are almost taken care of. Samantha has also had the testing done prior to the IEP conference and she has some fine depth perception problems, but she was unable to do the rest of the testing because she is so young she couldn't complete the tests. My only concern with Samantha is that she falls down a lot. The occupational therapist said that she didn't see any problems with her ability to manuver the classroom, but I advised her that I'd like to have Samantha evaluated out on the play ground. I don't know if she is just being a little girl or if she is really have peripherial vision problems and doesn't have time to look at what she is doing when she is running around. The OT said she would come and watch her at recess sometime soon and let me know what she finds. Samantha will be taking Braille classes twice a week for 20 minutes a day for this year, and 4 days a week for 30 minutes a day next year. With Kindergarten's short schedule it made more sense to have her taught only 2 a week right now.


They sent me home with a Brailler. We can now make raised bumps on paper!!!!! Of course I don't know how to read it so I've gotta throw away all papers that were played with just in case I've typed up some naughty words.

Then my little boy isn't quite so little. Duncan is having his first "real" sleepover with his buddy. By "real" sleepover I mean not at Grandma's house. We'll see how his night goes and whether he is going to come home really grumpy or some what normal.