Planning for Kindergarten

Planning for the Transition to Kindergarten begins in JANUARY for the school year starting in September.  Accordingly, we were recently assigned a school district transition expert for Skylar, since she receives special education services from the district and is due for assessment to determine her eligibility and services needed for kindergarten.  As I mentioned in my last (non-photo only) post, my suspicion is that Skylar will test out of speech services, which are only provided to the bottom 7% of students.

Her PLS-5 assessment, taken last summer at JTC, showed her receptive and expressive language skills to be on par with hearing peers, and she has only grown in these areas over the last 6 months.  Nonetheless, there are obvious reasons to keep providing services, therapy, and consultation to enable her to keep up this success.

At the meeting on January 30, the team agreed to drop speech therapy from direct weekly instruction to twice monthly consultation, and increase direct services from Skylar's TOD (teacher of the deaf) to weekly direct instruction.  The TOD will focus on acoustic discrimination, support her technology needs, and work toward her literacy and self advocacy goals.  Yay!  We have been super pleased with A's approach, and the results, since she was assigned as our new TOD last September. In addition, the U of O clinic we have been attending since October made a major leap forward with a new set of goals and objectives for Skylar, presented the day of the team check-in meeting.  Kudos to our graduate student K. and her supervisor H, for developing a professional, objective assessment and treatment plan for our girl.  It will be useful in and out of the clinic setting.    

So, about Kindergarten.  I definitely want the girls to go to school together.  This complicates things, because Paige's needs are different than Skylar's.  Both are thriving in Montessori, so the public Charter Montessori school (can you believe there is such a thing?!) is high on our list.  We will have to enter a lottery to secure spaces there, as with the other public schools that are not our neighborhood school.  So far, we have visited two of the five options we are considering, and there are definite differences in approach, focus, resources/special programs like music and art, setting, experience with deaf/HOH students, and parent involvement...to name a few!

Luckily, the school visits are spread out over two one-week periods a month apart, so we have some time to consider things before we visit the other three.  Watch this space for more reports after the February/early March school visits.

And enjoy the sun, if you have it where you are.  It's a stupendous day in Eugene!

Hard at work coloring at Cornucopia