Registered for Kindergarten!

It finally happened!  My son is registered for kindergarten!  Yay!  Whew!  It is such a huge relief!

We had our transition meeting with my son's preschool team and everything went a lot better than I anticipated.  The meeting started with the school psychologist taking the lead and sharing with us the results of the tests she conducted on my son.  I took notes just to keep myself occupied and so I would not freak out if the meeting went in a different direction than we were expecting.  After the psychologist reviewed her test results, the occupational therapist and the speech therapist did the same thing.  Fortunately, there were no real surprises with the results of the tests.

For the most part, in the developmental area, my son is within the normal range.  One area where he was actually a little above normal was in math.  My husband was really happy to hear this!  So as far as developmental goals, he does not have any for kindergarten because he is already on track with other kindergarteners since my son already knows the alphabet and appropriate sounds for each letter, sight words, numbers (counting), shapes, colors, etc. 

My biggest concern was that he would not be continuing with speech therapy but that concern was alleviated when the speech therapist went over the results of the tests she gave my son.  Although my son can speak somewhat clearly (to a certain extent) he still has problems with answering why questions, providing more explanatory answers, or understanding longer phrased questions.  I am simplifying what the speech therapist stated but at this point I was not totally focused since I was just so relieved to know that my son was going to continue speech therapy at school.

Of course, my son will continue to receive occupational therapy.  I do not think there was any question about that - either with us or his preschool team.  He does not yet hold a writing instrument correctly and essentially just scribbles on paper.  Additionally he has problems pushing down hard enough on his crayon/pencil/market so that it makes a darker impression on the paper he is "writing" on.  He also cannot, at this point cut a piece a paper with scissors without tearing the paper or cutting in a consistent pattern.   These will be part of his OT goals for next year.

After all the therapists presented their results from the various tests, my son's preschool teacher got a chance to present her observations and what she believes would be appropriate goals for my son.  Again, there was no surprises here since I have talked to my son's teacher on more than one occasion about the direction that we feel my son should go in.

The next step was determining what school he would go to and what program.  Again, we were very happy to learn that the team agreed with our desire that my son be placed in a self-contained classroom at a nearby elementary school.  The team also agreed that whenever my son is able, he will join the regular kindergarteners.   At this point, there was a long pause as if to indicate that the meeting was done.  Frankly, I would have been happy to leave but it dawned on me that I needed to ask, what, if anything, else needed to occur or needed to be done to make sure my son was registered at the proper school.   Interestingly, I did not get an immediate response to my question.  I was a little surprised since I know that this was not the first transition meeting for this team.  But for whatever reason, my questions resulted in a bit of confusion and discussion that ended in a "we will get back to you response."  The response took a week.  Personally, I was ready to go file his kindergarten registration paperwork almost immediately but had to wait for a response.  I was informed that I still had to register my son at our neighborhood school and that our neighborhood school would transfer his paperwork to the school my son would actually be attending.  The day after I submitted his kindergarten registration paperwork I got a call from our neighborhood school saying that his paperwork would be transferred that day and that if I had any questions I should call the new school.   Hugh Sigh of Relief!  Of course, I probably will not wait until the summer to hear from the new school but give them a call in the very near future to make sure there is not anything else I need to do that I was not told about.

In the meantime, we are very happy to have this little matter of where my son will be attending kindergarten settled.