School Update

School has been going really well for both kids.  They get to see each other throughout the day at meals and on the playground.

Esme is surrounded my mostly boys in her program.  She is the only girl in her class and there are only two in the other class.  They have been singing lots of new songs and learning all about letters and numbers.  Instead of doing letters in order, they start with the easiest ones.  She is also bringing home lots of fun art projects.  She was already invited to her first birthday party too.  We has a socially distanced gathering at a local park with some small pre-packaged snacks.  It was nice to meet some of the other parents and kids.  We also found out the birthday boy's family just moved to the neighborhood and are just a couple blocks away from us.

Parker has been gaining more and more distance learning skills as he continues working with Ms. Mary.  He can already sign himself in to his computer, type his teacher's name to get in to Google Meet and properly use his microphone.  It's been fun watching his skills blossom on the recorded meetings his teacher sends out.

They have been working a lot on reading as well.  Here is a video of some of his reading skills.  He mainly has sight words, but they are also working on sounding out new words.  A lot of ASD kids end us memorizing words instead of learning skills to read.

Both kids had a little bit of a cold last week that made them a bit slower and tired.

Parker doesn't normally have a rest time, but he laid down for a quick nap one day.  He was much more energetic after that.

He has also been bringing home some art projects.  They follow along virtually with their teacher and he has been doing some great work.  This is a show as viewed from the top.  Each "x" is a lace and the other shapes are decoration.

His school is preparing to potentially shift learning models to in person in November, but case numbers are on the rise in our county and state as a whole, so that may not be an option.  Due to classroom sizes, our hybrid model would only allow for 24% of students in school at a time leading to an AA, BB, CC, DD setup with kids in school only 2 days every 2 weeks.  It a ton of extra work for teachers with minimal benefit in my opinion.  Parker is in a very small class, so I am hoping they may consider alternate options or special needs kids.