The end of summer. Labor Day. Beginning of Fall. Only a few days left to swim. Almost time to start planning for Halloween costumes. September. Wow.

TwinkleToes is doing fantabulous in kindergarten. She loves going to school in the morning, and comes home just a jabbering about everything she did that day. Beginning with “I got my homewook and my books out of my pack pack and then I put my pack pack and my wunchbof in my wocker and then I signed in” and ending with “I got my pack pack out of my wocker and put my books and my homewook in my pack pack and I got my wunchbof and comed upstairs and there you were.” I get even the littlest details about everything… it takes at least an hour for her to tell me the whole thing, often she finishes up while we are eating dinner. She has to stop while we do homework, and then pick up again. A bonus — I’m hearing more about GlitterGirl’s day this year than I did last year, as they compete for my time – LOL.

TwinkleToes can’t coordinate to say backpack in a sentence just yet, we’re working on that. If she isolates the word and thinks about it really hard she can say it right, but in a sentence… it’s not going to happen in the near future. But her speech is not the worst in her class, and they can all understand each other. My goal was that she could communicate with her friends and teachers in kindergarten, and she’s just fine with that. She’s putting sentences together now, and doing a great job of expressing herself.

The coordinator for the “gifted” program is also the coordinator for all other special services (she is responsible for anything outside of what is considered to be within range of normal benchmarks) so she and I are already well acquainted with each other as we’ve worked to keep GlitterGirl nice and challenged. I sat down with her and explained where we are with TT’s speech and the reasons behind her speech issues. She had the school’s speech person evaluate her, and a meeting is planned for next week where decisions will be made about whether they will be taking TT out of class to give her speech services. I’ve already told them that because she’s been in speech therapy up until a few weeks ago that I believe TT will test at just below where she’s supposed to be, and that she likely won’t be far enough out of range for services at this point. My purpose in talking to them now was to help them establish where she is now, so that in January when they test her again they can see whether she’s gaining ground or staying static. I will be taking her to our speech therapist during Christmas break for testing as well, so we can see if she’s learning on her own now, or if she’s going to continue to need help to move her forward.

I am so proud of TwinkleToes. She had such a hard start in life, and now she is thriving beyond my wildest dreams. She smiles and laughs and just generally enjoys life. I’ve been told that she helps the other kids who aren’t doing as well, that she is very aware of kids who seem to need help, or who are standing off to the side with no one to talk to. They help her too, though. She’s too short to reach the soap dispenser or the towels in the bathroom, so the other kids help her with it. And she can’t reach to put her tray onto the window in the lunchroom (they all get trays, whether they bring their lunch or not), so someone does that for her, too. There is a sink in one of the kindergarten rooms, and she can use a stool to use that sink if she doesn’t want to get help in the bathroom, but she says her friends help her and she doesn’t want to use the sink in the room.

Their class (the kindergarten class as a whole, they change classes already and don’t stay in a single classroom all day) is mostly boys, and some of them are very big boys (a couple of them are bigger than GlitterGirl, even). Apparently the girls have really banded together and TwinkleToes (the tiniest in the class) is the only one brave enough to tell the boys as a group that they shouldn’t be doing that and they should apologize. Recess has apparently been quite an adventure. The teachers are aware of what goes on, and nothing has gotten out of control, but the story is that just when they are about to step in, they hear TwinkleToes speak up and then the kids work it out for themselves from that point. That’s another big point of the school, that students can self police, and the teachers are very good at assisting them when they need help doing it. They don’t step in and handle things, they step in and help the kids find a solution.

When I picked TT up from school the other day one of her teachers saw me and said, “You just never know what’s going to come out of her mouth, do you? Does she keep ya’ll in stitches at home?” I just laughed and said that yes, she does keep us laughing at home, and no, you don’t ever know what will come out of her mouth next. I then doublechecked that TT is raising her hand and waiting to be called on before speaking up and was assured that TT is very conscious of the rules and whether she is inside of the rules or outside of the rules, and that she works very hard to stay inside of them at all times.

She seems to be getting enough sensory input, one of the great things about this school is their philosophy of “active learning”, which means there isn’t a whole lot of sitting at a desk. There is some, of course, but it’s not a huge part of the day in kindergarten. For that matter it’s not a huge part of the day in the upper classes, either. It is for math, of course, but not for science or language arts or social studies. They do a whole lot of projects and very little busy work.

All of the kindergarten teachers are aware of TT’s sensory stuff, and they all have a few simple things they can do if they realize she is out of sorts and that it’s been a while since she’s had sensory input. Most of it is stuff they do anyway, I remember from when GG was in kindergarten that when the class was getting restless that they’d have them all stand up and they’d do a song that involved jumping and wiggling and hand clapping, and then sit them back down to finish whatever they’d been doing.

I’ve taken the day off Friday to volunteer in the kindergarten classrooms, it will be interesting to see how the day goes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.