Hi,
I'm a special needs teacher in a learning support unit in a secondary school . I trained as a primary school teacher and have been teaching in keystage 1 and 2 for 6 years......so I have written quite a few IEP's!! I am now teaching children with a range of special needs and one of my hats in the unit is to be responsible for the students with Asperger's.
I am quite concerned by the way your daughter's teacher couldn't actually produce any targets for her. The SENCo is responsible for over seeing the needs of individual children but usually within primary school, it is the class teacher who would set the targets, mainly because she would know your child the best.
All targets on IEP's should be 'SMART' Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Realistic, Target. Just by the things you have outlined, I would suggest targets like:
To stay focussed for 5 minutes whilst sat on the carpet for lesson input. Your daughter may be able to stay focussed for longer than this!
To answer 1 question per day during class discussions. Or if she would find this too much, she could have a target that would get her doing this in small groups to start with.
To use traffic light cards to show that she doesn't understand something. This is a really effective way of getting children to show they don't understand something without the rest of the class noticing, therefore the stigma is lost. Basically, you have a red, amber and green card attached by a treasury tag. If she understands she would leave the green card on top, if she's a bit unsure of what to do, she would put the amber card on top and if she really doesn't understand what she has to do at all, she would put the red card on top. Her teacher could monitor this from the other side of the classroom and support her where necessary. I use this with my whole class. Sometimes, if I have a few red cards up, I even get some of my children with their green card up to help other children with their amber card up. So they are learning social skills too!
It's really good that you are involved in your daughter's education and whilst you're given the opportunity with open arms, I would advise you to get in there! Also, it's very important that the targets are shared with the child so they know what they need to do to improve, what the success criteria will be and what they are good at.
Hope this helps!
Sorry to ramble on, I tried to summarise as much as poss!
Good luck
Emma
By the way, with reference to the funding in a reply to this post, it is the schools responsibility to inform parents as soon as an IEP is in place. The child may only be on the 'Early Intervention' stage of the special needs register, where the special needs are identified and are generally met within the classroom through differentiation-so therefore aren't funded.
