Thursday before school, we had a “Child Study meeting” at Christian’s school. We met with his teacher, math teacher, speech pathologist, school psychologist, and learning support person. The school nurse was supposed to be there as well, but she had surgery recently and was out. We really didn’t know what to expect at this meeting, but we knew we wanted to figure out what’s been going on with Christian.It went really well. I’m always overwhelmed by just how much his teacher cares about him. We talked about his strengths (he’s well liked and social, he seems confident, he’s a bright kid), and then talked about specific areas. They pulled him out of class for reading support and it turned out he’s reading at grade level now! Math he’s working at grade level except in problem solving (he gets lost in multi-step problems). So it’s really just writing that he’s struggling with (it’s still largely illegible). And he does still have attention issues in class, although his teacher said he’d settled down a lot in the last two weeks. (Funny considering he didn’t start drinking the Spark drink for focus until last Wednesday.)

So the next steps…. he’s going to be referred to an occupational therapist to help him with his writing. He’s going to have his writing evaluated and have a cognitive test (which benchmarks the results of the writing test). And we’re going to do a Bask (spelling?) test, which is a 128 question test that we take and his teachers take to screen for attention issues, depression, anxiety, and probably dozens of other things.

Christian’s first rated chess tournament was fun today. 5 rounds of chess in a field of 81 competitors (K-6 with a rating of less than 800). Christian won two of his games! Not enough to qualify for state, sadly (have to win three games in one tournament to qualify), but certainly respectable. Now he wants to go again, so I’ll be signing him up for the one March 10 in Mountlake Terrace.Fun!