Summer Goals

I'll be honest...over the school year I do very little with Oksana as far as her education is concerned.  She leaves us at 7:30 in the morning and comes back at 3:30.  She goes to bed at 6:30.  You can certainly understand why I am not interested in being her teacher for the 3 hours I have with her.  When she comes home it is all about play, dinner, bath, and bed.  If she has homework we certainly work on that so I'm not a total delinquent parent!  However, now that it's summer it's time to kick into high gear.  She will go to 4 weeks of summer school but it's only 1/2 day and it really just gives her therapy and maintains her goals rather than helping her create new goals.  So that's what I will be doing this summer...creating new goals and I figured this was a good place to document them so that I can reference them through the summer!  So here are Oksana's summer goals:

READING:
I don't have any specific goal here except to have her reading.  We read to her ALL THE TIME but we don't push her reading to us much during the school year.  This summer I want her to keep reading and improving those skills.  This is an area of strength for her.  She has managed to keep up with some of the kids in her class in reading which really blows my mind.  I want to encourage that.

MATH:
While reading is a strength, math is BY FAR a weakness.  Numbers just do not make sense to her in any way, shape, or form.  She doesn't even do math with her class anymore and just does it in the special ed room.  She's been home for almost 2 years now and on a good day can count to 12.  My summer goal for her is a lofty one.  I'm going to see if I can get her counting to 20 by the time she starts 1st grade.  If she can't at least she will have lots and lots of exposure to hearing the numbers by the end of summer!  I'd also like to continue to work on coin identification with her.  She had a hard time grasping that when they worked on it in school.

BEHAVIOR:
My least favorite thing to work on because I feel like I do it CONSTANTLY!  So here's the thing...we've worked a lot over the last 2 years on pretty major behaviors, and that will continue, however, in the process I feel like we have let go of working on some basic manners.  So our behavior goals are to work on areas where she is just rude, and on basic ways to treat people with respect.  So for example, when you can't find something you don't start running through the house screaming "WHERE IS MY BALL?!" at the top of your lungs and demanding that someone help you.  Instead you quietly find  mom or dad.  Walk all the way up to us and say "Mom, can you please help me find my ball?"  We are also working QUITE A BIT on who is the boss and who isn't the boss.  Oksana is not the boss in our house and she knows that in her head but her behaviors show us that she still wants to be boss in her heart.  As we had a discussion about this the other day she went off to eat dinner.  She asked for a second serving and when Larry gave it to her she said "Thanks boss!"  LOL!  Another example of an area I want to work on happened just this morning.  She wanted to play with something that belonged to Evan so we talked about asking permission and treating something that isn't yours with more respect than if it was yours.  She had to wait for Evan to get up, ask him permission (he said yes), we talked about the fact that sometimes he will say no then talked about how to treat the thing that she would be playing with.  Finally, we discussed that if she can't treat his things with respect she would not get to play with them anymore.  Get my point here?  These are just a couple of examples of things we will be working on to improve her social skills and overall treatment of other people. 

SCIENCE:
Ok I don't really need science goals but it's fun so I'm adding it.  My goal this summer is to do some fun science experiments.  We are going to make flubber, goop, volcanoes, lava lamps, etc.

DRESSING:
Oksana can completely undress undress herself but dressing is a whole other story.  We've made great strides but she is not independent yet.  I fully blame that on myself.  Oksana has to get up early enough in the morning for school.  I refuse to wake her up earlier so we can have the extra 15 minutes needed to let her dress herself.  Instead I just do it and get her out the door.  So this summer we will be working on dressing herself.  Underwear and pants are by far the hardest.  She is almost independent with her shirt.  

I think that's about it for now.   You may wonder why I don't have any writing goals.  That's because writing is another major area of struggle for her.  We can make math fun.  I have no idea how to make writing fun for her so I'm going to leave that to summer school!