Update

All seems going along OK at the moment, asked him to relay a story he is reading currently while doing his exercises this morning. The was much resistence as he just prefers to do something easy, but I insisted. After throwing himself around, he started and did a very good job of retelling it in an ordered manner. the book was a about a white lion, and he even digressed at one point to tell me that the lion was white because he had a special gene similar to white Bengal Tigers (thank you Animal Park). They had a test last week in English (sounded like comprehension work), he told me he was disappointed as he nearly finished but left 2 questions out, after investigating further I found out there where 26 questions in all. I told him I thought that was fantastic- only left 2 out, sounds brilliant to me.
During a maths lesson told the class taecher he knew all his times tables, so she tested him and he had them all right.

Cub Scout Silver Award

Matthew recieved his cub scout silver award on Wednesday night and we all went to a presentation evening to see him receive his certificate. The cubs have been absolutely brilliant with Matthew, no feeling of exclusion from them. He was so over the moon he specifically asked me to put his picture on the blog. He has taken his certificate to school today, to show in assembly.

S&L Special Support Teacher

The S&L SSA had her open afternoon yesterday she teaches Matthew for 2 X 30 mins a week, but only in Welsh. She said Matthew has made very good progress., he scored last June as being average in English and just below in Welsh on their S&L assessment, she will retest this year to compare things.
She was VERY interested in hearing about Dore, and said the only problem she had with them was the cost. I did point out that it would have cost us a comparable sum for private OT, but Dore is so much more organised,rigurous and targeted than OT. We had to wait 12 months for NHS OT, yes they understood and have more standing with the school than Dore, but we couldn't wait 12 months in limbo.
She also related how he answered a question in English 1 lesson and was astonished at how "articulate" he was, she wanted to go on with the conversation but of course she had to go back to Welsh. I never thought the word "articulate" would be used to describe my son!!
His Welsh is obviously behind as we had to concentrate on his English due to the fact that he had serious deficits pre Dore with English, having a word recall age of 4.5 yrs 1 month before Dore he was 8.6yrs at the time. So we have now got to blast him with the Welsh. My husband will have to be roped in for this as my Welsh is slow, although I can converse with him he knows I do not have the vocabularly- maybe we can improve together! Although he seems to convers really well in Welsh the confidence and some grammar is slow.

12 Asesssment -11th follow up

here are our latest assessment and the results are getting consistenly green, for the first time ever we had all greens, Test 1 +2 were only checked once as they were green they were not repeated. Test 4+5 were tested 3 times and the bar shows the range, which I think is really good but they want to see those tighter still!!

Slight regression

Matthew seems to be going through a slight regression in that he hasn't been hearing things correctly again, it fills me with fear when I am repeating words to him, his Dad has noticed too, but I know it will get better. Conversley he went back to school and told me that he had had a brilliant day with his work and his reading was more fluent last night. So perhaps we are moving forward again- I'll keep you informed :)
His tutor has decided to concentrate more on his written work, although he doing maths and Welsh alternative weeks(more to give him an extra feel good/confidence factor in his maths) on his maths week she is slipping in 20 mins of written and all the homework is going to be written.
Gawd he needs it, it is coming across as lazy e.g. she asks him to write about his day and he doesn't use full sentences, more of a list e'g. I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast, made bed etc. I know it's just him getting around the fact that he hates writing, avoidance tactics basically.

Paediatrician Follow-up

We revisited the Paediatrician last week, had a little chat about Matthew's progress and the outcome was "Keep on doing what your doing and things will continue to improve". We agreed that it was all the interventions together that were making the impact. Although if I wasn't subsidising the school with all the extra help, I'm sure he wouldn't be making the progress that he is, but he is able to learn now so must be happy with that.

Stairway to Spelling finished

Well we have finished Stairway to spelling, we didn't even use the technique on the last fifty words. I just quizzed him while doing his exercises, and went over the ones he had wrong about twice and he got them. We have been learning lists from the Education City site we signed up to last year- we have 3 months left of our subcription. He whizzed through English Yr 4 over Easter break and has moved on to Yr 5 English and is now learning Yr 5 spelling words. The first list was learnt in a day i.e. i before e except after c words e.g receipt, conceit, field, brief. He did them on the site as a game and I am retesteing them while he does his exercises.