Blog 4

Tara doesn't only just help teach and work with kids with disorders, but she also does evaluations too. Similarly to how she works with some kids, she goes into the houses of the child she is evaluating. The goal of evaluating is to see if the child qualifies to get help from the school district. But she also gives parents advice on how to help their kid and answers questions the parents may have. The way she sees if the child qualifies is she a bunch of papers that have like questions she has to ask. And she also takes notes on the kid's behavior. She doesn't just go in and ask the questions one after another to the parent. She tries making the parent comfortable, because most of the time she's never met them and they've never met her. In between questions she'll have small talk about the kid with the parents and also ask some other questions about the kid as they go on. It's not like one set structured way to do the evaluation, each one is different. I was able to see her do an evaluation of a child the other day. Something she said was that a strategy to evaluate the child is the play with the child and also ask simple questions to see how they respond. Seeing how the child plays with toys shows what the child is like. It's also important to see how the kid interacts with adults and see if it's normal. She doesn't ask the kids complicated questions, she asks more simple questions like, "what did you have for breakfast?", or like, "what's your favorite toy?", or like, "how does this toy work?". She kind of like disguises the evaluation of the child through these questions and playing with the kid to make the kid more comfortable.

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