Congrats! You have finished the Individual Education Plan (IEP) for your child. They have given you a copy of it and when you go to read you realize it makes little to no sense. Hopefully this brief guide helps you to better understand your child’s IEP.
Terminology
Initial Position: The beginning sound is a word. Example the p in pad
Medial Position: The middle sound(s) in a word. Example the a in pad
Final Position: The ending sound in a word. Example d in pad
Self-generated: Child’s regular conversation
Phonemes: A unit of sound in speech. The English language has 44 phonemes that are represented by the 26 letters of the alphabet individually and in combination.
Sections of the IEP
Skill Area: This section of the IEP goes through your child’s performance level, standard performance, how this affects their education, and your child’s benchmarks with goals.
IEP Services: This entails the who, what, when, where, and how for the services that will be provided.
IEP Accommodations: This section talks about special accommodations for testing and is where you get to add your thoughts on what your child specifically needs to succeed in school. If you need a list of ideas, check out last week’s article.
IEP LRE Placement & Written Notice: This decides where your child will learn best. If they are just going for speech it will most likely designate the general education classroom, meaning the regular classroom.
FAQ
What if my child’s goal is to produce the /th/ in conversation with 80% percent accurancy, what does that mean? That means that when your child is in regular conversation they will say the sound accurately 80% percent of the time.
What does it mean if my child’s goal is to produce the /r/ sound in isolation? This means that your child can produce the correct sound for the letter r by itself and not in a word.
What does it mean if my child’s goal is to produce the /l/ sound in the initial position of syllables, and in the initial position of words with 80% accurancy? This means that your child will use the l sound correctly in the beginning sound of a word 80% of the time.
