Evaluation

Today Owen had his speech evaluation at the IU. Two very sweet ladies tested him- a speech therapist and a developmental evaluator. Owen felt so comfortable with them... maybe a little too comfortable! The evaluation lasted over an hour and even though I had only requested to have him evaluated for his speech, they tested all the developmental areas: communication, cognitive, social, self-help, and physical development. He did such a great job! It was so neat to see all the little "tasks" they had him do. They made it fun so Owen thought he was just "playing". At one point, they gave him 8 little cubes and asked him to build a tower. After stacking five blocks his tower fell over and they told him to try again and see if he could use all eight. He started to line up the blocks horizontally and I really wanted to jump in. However, after he placed three blocks down next to each other, he put two on top and then made the tower on top of that. Since his first method did not work, he decided to make a base for his tower. We were all pretty impressed! They also checked his hearing. He did fine with the high decibels, but could not hear the lowest decibels. She said that is common in kids that have had a lot of ear infections, but she also thinks it could have been the room. She said the lights make a noise that possibly make it difficult to hear the lowest decibels. She said Owen is using developmentally appropriate speech sounds at this time. He does have errors of later developing sounds including k/t and d/g substitutions at the beginning of words. We are going to monitor his progress and if those sounds do not begin to correct themselves by age 4 we will have him reevaluated. By the end, he was asking the ladies questions like, "Ten you tell me which one is veen?" He had a lot of fun and did not want to leave when it was time to go! I got some fun ideas of things I can do with him at home too!