Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Kindergarten Visiting Address: Social History

That time of year, when pre-k special needs class, you begin to think about the process of transition to kindergarten.

This year is a little girl in my class an interesting combination of strengths and challenges.

She has a good level and cognitive ability to learn the vocabulary and concepts through incidental learning. She has a great capacity of the stem base of pre-college (which knows all the letters of the alphabet in uppercase and lowercase letters, can count to 15, can identify 11 colors and 6 shapes Commons. She knows a lot of consonants beginning, knowledge of rhyming words, you can read the names of all students in the class and read about 10 sight words.)

She is overwhelmed by new experiences and challenges in the transition to new activities (especially if it is in a different location on campus). She still needs support staff to potty training. Her fine motor skills are significantly delayed, and she always support staff to many tasks involving visual motor planning.

We decided to try to address specifically the strength of the region lies in an area that is a big challenge for him while he is still in pre-k. Is going to start going to a common reading and phonetics lesson kindergarten for about 20 minutes a day. Because he is a good cognitive abilities, and he does not need to support staff ready for the big group, Circle K, we're going to try to reconcile the challenge of new experiences. We hope you will become familiar with the construction of nursery, kindergarten, and a wider group of kindergarten students. We also hope that the staff pre-k can not go with him for a short time and then disappear in order to increase the independence and comfort in our kindergarten class.

To help prepare for this, we developed a simple social history (you can download a generic copy here.) Subject to walk in the kindergarten class. She has a copy at home that his family has read it for the last week and there is a copy at the school, staff in the classroom have read with her, too. We are also starting to go to the kindergarten room and have conversations about visits to kindergarten on Monday.

We hope by overlaying the support of staff and also build on its strengths, it will start to feel comfortable and be able to learn new skills in preschool.