How do you measure the progress of a child with developmental delays? We've just been through the exercise of creating an Individualised Education Plan (IEP) for Lyle. Part of the process involves setting goals for his teachers over the next year. Initially his speech and language teacher had set his goal to be that he would learn twenty words over the next year. Sam, a friend of ours who attended the IEP meeting with us, pointed out that language acquisition was very important to us and that the goal seemed a bit... well... lightweight. We talked with his teacher again this morning and pointed out that even though it was generally agreed that Lyle had been slacking in the new word acquisition department this year he still had demonstrated the generally correct use of 16 new words since the start of January. Even assuming a linear curve he should still be on track to gain mastery over 30 words in the next year. She rewrote his goal to be 40 words (!) plus some adjective/noun combinations. We will, of course, accept either spoken words or signs as counting towards the total.