John Wayne Fact: After meeting the late Superman (1978) star Christopher Reeve at the 1979 Academy Awards, Wayne turned to Cary Grant and said, "This is our new man. He's taking over.".

September 8th: Duke had his first IEP (Individual Education Program) on Wednesday. In this meeting we got his first goals for his Pre-K experience and it made me revisit almost 3 years ago when Duke was given goals from Children's Hospital. It made me reflect on how much he had grown and changed.

       From September 21, 2010:  Now to take him home means he has to do the following 1. Breathe on his own 2. Maintain his temperature 3. Be able to feed via his mouth. These are goals I know Duke can achieve because with him only being 5 days old he is pleasing the doctor with ever stride he makes. Before leaving they will still need to do a hearing test because often times babies born early have some hearing loss and we will need to see if and how much he has. We will also have to start testing him in a car seat to ensure he is comfortable and there are no problems with him in his seat.

        From September 4, 2013: This meeting had 9 people talking about Duke's Goals

1. Academic Communication: Given Verbal and visual prompts, Duke will produce the p,b,m,n,w sounds in 2-4 words utterances  with 80 % accuracy. (This one was increased in the meeting because Duke is saying full sentences.)
2. Academic Early Learning Skills: With fading verbal and visual prompts, Duke will participate in circle time activities for at least 10 minutes, by performing motor actions to familiar songs and finger plays, completing early learning activities and taking and waiting for his turn.
3. Academic Early Learning Skills: With a verbal prompt and fading visual supports, Duke will follow two step directions to complete classroom activities, with 80% accuracy.
4. Academic Social Interactions Skills: When given fading adult facilitation to independence, Duke will participate in interactive play and learning experiences with peers, for increasingly longer periods of time.
5. Physical Gross Motor: Duke will access his school environment with supervision assistance on 2-3 trials.  

       We have a walk through of Duke's Pre-school class on Friday and he will be going Monday- Friday for 2 hours a day and he is going to going 5 days a week. With his new love of Superman we made sure to get him a superman back pack, now it's just what does he wear for his first day of school.

Duke feeding a Geese

Duke feeding a Goat.