Our Shining Stars

Krystabelle

Krystabelle is very happy most of the time and has a passion for horses and riding her RAZOR. Despite this, she struggles emotionally, socially as well as academically, and is demonstrating some very large lagging skills in all of these areas despite the interventions provided in our school.

Socially and emotionally, Krystabelle is around the age of a five-year-old. This makes interacting, engaging in play with peers very difficult. She has a hard time reading, evaluating and understanding other people’s emotions. She is very blunt and matter of fact when speaking with her peers and cannot understand why her words might hurt someone else’s feelings. Although Krystabelle is an only child, the concerns I am seeing go far beyond that of an only child. She has difficulty taking turns, with flexibility and can be very rigid. She prefers to spend her time either alone or with adults and must be encouraged to interact with peers. Krystabelle has many executive function deficits and because of this always seems to be one or two steps behind her peers in the classroom. She has difficulty following instructions, even one step directions, task initiation, flexible thinking, self-monitoring among other areas.

Academically Krystabelle came to us well below grade level. Although Polish is spoken at home by mom, the concerns I see academically do not seem to be related to that of a second language learner. This February (her second grade year and her first month at my school) she tested into beginning of the year first grade math as well as beginning of the year first grade reading. Although she has made some growth in both areas she still continues to be more than a year behind in reading math and writing. She struggles with basic concepts such as basic numeracy, counting up, counting backwards, understanding money (Such as 100 cents equals one dollar) and counting money. She is unable to complete math independently and requires the use of manipulatives, instructions given multiple times, and many scaffolds and modifications.

Although Krystabelle’s phonics knowledge is improving, she requires one-on-one assistance for any writing tasks. She is able to form basic simple sentences with common phonetic misspellings age appropriate for a first grader. Her ideas for stories and sentence structure is very basic. She struggles to understand simple grammar such as verbs and nouns. Even her drawings are very basic and represent those that a typical 5 or 6 year old would draw. Her DIBELS ORF, WRF, and CLS are yellow, while her NWF is red.

Krystabelle requires constant one-on-one support throughout the day. She needs redirection and explicit instruction in order to keep up with the rest of the class. She spends the majority of her day confused by the activities both academically and socially, but is for the most part very agreeable as long as it does not consist of taking turns or not getting her way. She also will strategically disappear in the bathroom or slip out of sight during non-preferred tasks.

I’ve noticed she finds things to fixate on & has a hard time navigating her world away from the things, whether it be horses, snacks, etc. She seems to find comfort in the things she can control. She will chatter all throughout the day, often incessantly, which seems to bring her a level of comfort. She does all her mental processing aloud including everyday tasks such as what she sees, what she’s thinking etc. She needs visual schedules for most activities throughout the day which helps her understand what will come next in her day and often will help with the verbal stimming. She often will repeat the same phrases throughout the day over and over (Here we go..., okay, let’s do this...) Boundaries are also a struggle for Krystabelle. She has no awareness of stranger danger and will approach strangers and overshare personal information to a level of concern. She can’t understand when other students place personal space boundaries and is often very hurt and confused. She loves hugging but also isn’t aware when other people might not want a hug.