Progress Monitoring and Integrated Services

The academic progress of students at AIM Academy is our top priority. To optimize our students’ development as readers, mathematicians, writers and critical thinkers our teachers must adapt to the changing needs and abilities of their students. Our Psychology Department lends their expertise by working closely with teachers to develop tailored academic interventions and to monitor each student's progress throughout the year. Using timely and meaningful assessments to help answer the questions, the team gathers information about students' current academic levels and rates of improvement towards short and long-term goals. They ask questions such as: How much progress? Compared to what? Expected by when? Ongoing data analysis allows our team to evaluate the effectiveness of the instruction and to optimize each student's education plan by making timely, targeted adjustments or enrichments to individual programming. Progress is monitored on a weekly basis in the Lower School and the results are shared with parents at parent-teacher conferences and by request.

Unlike many schools specializing in students with language-based learning disabilities AIM Academy’s staff includes in-house School Psychologists, Occupational Therapists and Speech and Language Pathologists to support students, teachers and families. This is an added convenience for our parents and a striking advantage for our students. Our professionals have the ability to interact with students before, during or after the school day. In addition, they share their expertise with teachers and parents which provides the optimal academic experience for each child.

Assistive Technology: AIM has a wide variety of assistive technology available to support students as they research, read, write, and do math including Learning Ally audio textbooks, Inspiration, iPad apps, speech-to-text software and online programs that provide practice to increase reading and math fluency.

Occupational Therapy
Speech and Language Therapy

Occupational Therapy

What is Occupational Therapy?

AIM Academy Occupational Therapists (OTs) have specific knowledge and expertise to help children perform school-related activities and daily routines to fulfill their roles as students. AIM's OTs use a holistic approach when assessing student's performance across a broad range of skills through participation in individually designed activities and supported work on classroom assignments. They also assist our students with many tasks, including executive functioning skills, written work, number sense, visual spatial skills, and use of assistive technology.

Therapists may work with students both outside of the classroom and in the classroom to support academic performance. Therapists are in weekly contact with instructors to discuss classroom performance and provide recommendations as needed.

Lower School Occupational Therapy

Students improve classroom performance by practicing skills including: cutting with scissors, handwriting, copying from the board, and maintaining attention during activities. Students also frequently work on classroom projects during OT sessions to enhance executive functioning skills including: planning, organization, typing, and editing. Students are introduced to assistive technology as needed.

Speech and Language Therapy

What is Speech and Language Therapy?

The key components of helping our students become fluent and strategic readers can be outlined into two main areas: word recognition and language comprehension. We do not always associate language development with reading but it is one of the two critical factors.

At AIM Academy, we take the research in reading seriously by providing full time Speech and Language Pathologists who are available to support students in the classroom, support the teachers as they individualize instruction and provide one-on-one therapy where the individual plan for a child indicates this is needed. Additionally the SLPs have provided assessment in areas such as phonological awareness and reading comprehension to assist classroom teachers in monitoring students’ progress in those areas.

Consultation/collaboration with teachers typically involves providing insights into underlying language deficits that may be affecting academic performance and collaborating on strategies to help the student improve the deficit or compensate by minimizing the impact. SLPs are also available to faculty during a progress monitoring meeting to add their perspectives.

Lower School Speech and Language

In individual work with students, the SLP in the Lower School may work with students on articulation for sounds such as /r/, /l/, /th/ and /s/ or may work with the students on improving their ability to hear sound differences, blend sounds, sequence sounds, and various other skills commonly referred to as “phonemic awareness”. Additionally, the SLP works with students’ expressive and receptive language skills. Common areas of intervention for students may include services to improve use of grammar; the formulation of meaningful, complete sentences; developing explanations or descriptions of experiences; retellings of stories in a fluent cohesive manner; and the use of academic vocabulary within the classroom environment. The SLP may also work with students who are struggling in academic areas with heavy language emphasis such as reading comprehension and written expression.