Come On People...Are you really that busy?

Mr 5 is progressing nicely with his speech pathologist; who I would highly recommend to any one looking for a SP for a child. He is struggling with reading though and cannot co related between the letter sound and the combination of sounds to make a word. He relies heavily on the secondary prompt, which at this stage is a picture, but if the picture is ambiguous, like a person laughing he will say the person is funny. He is not looking at the word enough to establish that it could not be "funny" as it starts with "l". He is a rote learner, he can tell me all the 12 Golden Words.
BUT only if they are in the order that appear on the grid, mix them up and he struggles, he has got his Golden Certificate and is now working in his Red one, many children in the class have already achieved Blue and Green as well as Red. These "magic words' are the words children see most often and rather than have to "sound them out" each time, they become part of what is know as sight vocabulary, that being they recognise the words on sight in any context. Words such as "a, is, the, there, was, I , am, be, were, not, no, of, on, this" . Mr 5 tends not to have the ability to absorb the words out of context...But he'll be a wiz at times tables and such I think.

His pencil grip an issue and I contacted his EIP OT to see if she could recommend anyone: we cannot access SCHC services anymore as he is in school now according to the lady at the desk; which was apparently not entirely true as the pediatric OT put me in touch with the Paed OT who works with local schools ( betcha didn't know we had that service here, I didn't) and I can ask the school to use part of Mr 5s funding to pay for the OT visits which are better facilitated in the class environment anyway given it is a pencil grip issue. I am OK with this as his aide does not appear to work on Tuesdays anyway. I am waiting for the OT and the Principal to get back to me...* Yawn* It's been a week now................

Meanwhile I have sourced a private physio for him as the area concerned crosses both physio and OT areas so either is OK and I JUST KNOW the school will not pay an external OT for this...what he needs, he needs now and what's private health insurance for anyway.

On the matter of private health insurance, this week I will have reached my limit for Mr 5's speech therapy and it's only August...So we have kicked in his Enhanced Primary Care Program ( EPC) Which means that Medicare pay $45 each for FIVE visits to his ST. Which should carry us through to mid November so by my calulations ,I will only pay out of pocket full session fees for three session this year...Not too shabby. I am going to write to my PHI provider to see if I can get an increase on limits for Mr 5's ST given it will be a long term thing. I had contacted a well known SP in NSW who chairs many committees and deals a lot with dyspraxia who advised me that PHIs can increase limits on some ancillaries if you are willing to lose something else ( ie: increase ST limit by $250 and forgo $500 limit on osteopathy) You write to them and supply a diagnosis from the provider stating the condition is ongoing and long term. This is a very one to one, case by case, scenario but hey, rules were meant to be broken and I'm the one who will always try.