“Well done, you’re a star!”
Those are the words written on my son’s Merit Certificate that he received last Friday during the school assembly! Our first assembly since he started school, and it was so worth the RSVP!
My son! Awarded for “trying hard and participating in [the] Pre-Primary activities”.
I felt like crying when I saw the look on his face as they announced his name over the speakers.
I felt like crying when I saw his grin as he stood up there with the others to face the crowd.
His grin grew bigger when his classmates yelled his name in surprise and from their tone I could tell they envied his certificate.
There are many reasons why my son has received his certificate and one of them is the fact we managed to help boost his self-confidence, which then brought this domino effect through everything he had to improve on: learning to stay put at mat time, developing his social skills, interacting better with his mates and turning storylines into art.
This wasn’t an easy thing to do for a child with autism. A lot was hit-or-miss and required us getting back up and learning from our mistakes. But we did our best as parents, and we worked with his therapists and teachers to help him in everything he was doing.
The Individual Education Plan developed with the school has been a great driver of all this. It’s brought everyone onto the same page, with realistic and achievable goals. We’ve involved everyone into his plan and that, I think, has helped things move faster.
We still have a lot to work on, especially preparing him to start Primary next year. So next (besides working on his speech) we’ll be focusing a lot, lot more on sharing and having an open mind, because the classroom setting will be different: he will have an allocated desk but during activity time he would need to swap places. We are not sure how he would react, so during the few months left of 2013 we’ll work with the occupational therapist to get him to start practicing at home.
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