A six year old with intellectual disability

A six year old with intellectual disability

19th July 2018

Our son is 6 years old with an intellectual disability. He is in senior infants in main stream school where he has great support from the school, however we felt that he needed additional support from someone who was used to dealing with children like him.
At the time of meeting Helen he was struggling in a lot of areas but we decided to focus mainly on prewriting skills , numerical & the alphabet.

We started to visit Helen on a weekly basis where she introduced new programmes such as Handwriting without tears and Numicon in order to teach our son in a more visual way.She also suggested that she meet his resource teacher at school to ensure that she is always working on the same programmes as school to keep consistency and avoid overload and confusion with my son.

As we do not drop him off, Helen communicates with us via a notebook and sends us regular videos of his work. This communication is invaluable to see his quick progression.Currently he is able to do 6 of the 8 prewriting skills , he has learned a lot of the alphabet via the handwriting without tears system and he can now write his name. He also recognizes the numbers and can count from 1 to 5.

Helen understands our son, she chats to him about his day and his very comfortable with her. She knows how to get him to concentrate and rewards him with stickers. All of this is vital in his learning development.

We will continue to work with Helen over the summer months as the work she is doing is invaluable and the rewards are so tangible. We are so happy to have found her and would highly recommend her.

Yours Sincerely,
Maeve – Galway.