Progress Monitoring and Integrated Services

The academic progress of students at AIM Academy is our top priority. To optimize student’s 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 and targeted adjustments to individual programming. Monitoring occurs on each student every three weeks.

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 student.

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.

Upper School Occupational Therapy

During their high school years, students are expected to become more independent learners and consumers. In occupational therapy, students learn to develop strategies to become more self-reliant when encountering challenges in both school and community activities. Students participate in activities that focus on the development of executive function skills, such as prioritization and planning, task initiation and self advocacy. Occupational therapy is also individualized for each student to work on additional skills such as: writing and organizational support, consumer math abilities, and preparing for the transition to higher education. Occupational Therapists at AIM collaborate with teachers on a weekly basis to provide recommendations and resources to use in the classroom for the carry-over of skill development.

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 progress monitoring meeting to add their perspectives.

Upper School Speech and Language Therapy

In the Upper School, Speech and Language Pathologists target individualized goals relating to speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing through contextual material. Using discussion, modeling, and rehearsal, speech and language intervention incorporates reading strategies and uses homework assignments to help students recognize how understanding the morphology of words improves vocabulary. To target written language, students learn and use strategies for developing more varied and complex syntax. Students who need support to initiate or edit their written work may have challenges composing a main idea, developing details, or using proper writing mechanics. To target comprehension skills, students work with clinicians to identify the main idea and the details that support it in their reading. Examples of successful intervention strategies include rereading with a clinician using “questioning for answers”, chunking, visualizing and charting. Support is provided to develop strategies for building competencies ranging across a complex set of meta-linguistic skills, from understanding double-meaning words to inferring from context. A goal for all Upper School students is to increase self-awareness and self-advocacy, and to develop the personal resources needed for their educational and professional experiences after graduation.