2021-22 End of Year Assessment--Beowulf

 

This was a difficult year for Beowulf.  The trauma with Brother affected him deeply, and when the dust settled enough for us all to breathe again, his behaviors ramped up dangerously high.  For the majority of the school year, we focused on finding the right med regimen, and his progress shows that focus.

He is on a (mostly) working regimen at the moment.  His ADHD is not under control, but his anxiety and violence are (mostly).  Stimulant meds are best at helping him focus, but their effect doesn't last over time.  Each one we've tried has had great effect for a month, 2 months, or even 6 months, but after that, the effect drops to nil.  In addition, as the meds leave his system each day, he is driven to violent outbursts.  At the moment, he has been prescribed an extended-release stimulant med, but we're taking a summer break from it.  I'll be reintroducing it to his regimen in the last week of July in preparation for his August psych appointment as we pick up a more school-ish schedule.

Beowulf's reading has improved this year.  Once we dropped a formal language arts curriculum and picked up reading and narrating, I noticed his interest and his skills improve.  He reads with reasonable fluency, and he picks up meaning from context.  He makes connections and predictions that make sense for each story he reads. 

His handwriting is painful.  Even copying takes incredible concentration, utterly exhausting him after the fewest of minutes.  He did learn cursive this year, and the continuity of cursive writing seems to be more comfortable than printing is.  His narrations this year started with him dictating, me writing, and him tracing what I wrote.  We moved on to him copying what I wrote on alternating lines. Depending on the day, his handwriting can be anywhere from reasonably legible to completely illegible.  I required every entry to be illustrated in some way in order to keep him using a pencil without the stress of writing words.

He never writes by choice.

I dropped spelling (except for Explode the Code 2 and 2 1/2) from his schedule early in the year. Until he gets more comfortable working with a pencil or pen, it's a moot point.

Beowulf finished Rod and Staff Grade 2 Math and spent about a week in Rod and Staff Grade 3 Math.  The copying of problems from the text to his math notebook was impossible.  I purchased an IXL Grade 3 math workbook, and he did much better with that.  He mostly memorized the times tables and seemed to understand the other grade-level concepts.  However, when I gave him the placement test for TGTB math, he did not even come close to qualifying for the grade 4 program--he barely qualified for the grade 3 book!

He thought TGTB math looked fun, and he was pretty jealous of the math games and activities his siblings were doing, so we decided to go ahead and start the grade 3 book.  It was a mistake--too busy and jumpy.  Every lesson seemed to take hours to finish.  The school year was too close to the end for me to bother finding yet another curriculum, so we pushed through to our end date (which coincided with the end of the first unit) and then put it away. 

He participates well in Morning Meeting and Academy reading, but bedtime reading is often a disaster for him.  It takes him almost the whole time to settle down, and even though I have many helps in place for him, he too frequently refuses to use them and needs to leave the room to gather himself.

He sings a lot.  

He loves dance.

He has fun playing with children outside of our family, and when I asked him if he could name 3 friends, he had to think about it, but he could name them.

He's really enthusiastic and fun to be around.  He's learning which calming/coping strategies work for him, and he's trying to use them.  (His best one is a strong, hard bear hug.)  He loves Legos and any activity that gets his adrenaline pumping.

I'm hopeful that by spending this past year focused on mental health and safety, the school year ahead will be able to be filled with academic, social, and emotional growth.