Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Kindergarten?
So Brent and I have tentatively been planning on keeping Griffin in preschool one more year and sending him to kindergarten when he turns 6. He is a late summer birthday so he would barely be 5 if he went this year. When we had our parent teacher conference in October, his teacher really recommended giving him another year of preschool. For kicks I applied to a local private school to get some testing done and see what they recommended. He went in last Saturday morning and loved it. He kept talking about the fun games they played and how he loved kindergarten. Today we went in for the conference where we learn how he did on the tests. He did pretty well. He was dead average for the concepts portion and at a 5-6 year old age level for language (no surprise to anyone who comes across my child). His weakest area was motor skills mainly fine motor and he was slightly lower than average. Overall they said he was "wiggly", "talked constantly", and needed repetition of directions at times. Then he recommended him to start kindergarten next year and offered him placement in the school. It is all kind of overwhelming. This school has a pre-K program so I was sure they would recommend that. Especially when they started off the conference by saying he was the youngest kid that they tested that day. We still are thinking we will wait for kindergarten, but I am interested in seeing what his current teacher thinks at the conference in March.
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4 comments:
wow! it seems impossible that it's almost time for him to go to school.
That is pretty interesting after all of the research you have put into it and your career experience with kids. You were hoping for some real guidance on which way to go, weren't you?
Mason had similar results to the testing (I think) with fine motor skills and following directions.
I guess they feel that they can help him to make up the lower scores in kindergarten.
We're going back and forth with Mollie too. Being a former K teacher, I feel inside myself that the best thing for her in the future would be to wait a year. The older kids just tend to do better, have more confidence and on and on. Also, having been a K teacher, and nothing against boys...but they usually just aren't quite as mature as girls during k-1st grade so I would recommend waiting also on him. They do catch up though by 2-3rd. I wish that Mollie wasn't so darn tall! They thought she was starting K last year at Morgan's school. That's part of our dilemna too. Morgan goes to a magnet school that is very fast-paced and I just don't know that Mollie is ready for that, being 10 months younger than when M started. We thought Morgan was extremely smart and she's very middle of the class at this school. We have a Kindergarten Readiness program (specifically for summer birthdays) at the school where we're zoned that I'm leaning towards. It just means I'll be busting myself next year to get them both picked up, etc. That's my 2 cents. But unless, she matures a lot in the next 7 months, we'll probably not start "real" K for another year. She's at the highest preschool class at her school, so that's not an option.
gave you and award...check it out on my blog. :0)
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