Kindergarten screening and what not to say in Kindergarten

Hard to believe but Aidan, Maddie and Zoe completed their kindergarten screening this week! Our district assesses kids at about age 3-1/2 for kindergarten readiness so that if a child demonstrates a deficiency in areas such as cognitive learning, speech, motor skills, etc., there is time before kindergarten to address those issues. All three of our kids "failed" the hearing tests, though the nurse thinks it may be because they are all recovering from colds and also may not have understood what to do when hearing the beeps in their headphones. Otherwise, Aidan passed all his "tests" with flying colors but for vision, so we get to take him to get his vision checked. Maddie also did great, no concerns at all. Zoe, however, demonstrated some delays with her fine and gross motor skills, which we expected. Since she tested fine in all other areas, however, she doesn't qualify for services from our district - a child must show deficiencies in 2 areas to receive services from an early childhood special education teacher or an occupational therapist. We did get some handouts on things we can do to help her, and we may also check with our pediatrician on additional therapy from a private occupational therapist. Otherwise, all should be ready to go to kindergarten at age 5 in the fall of 2013 should we decide to send them then!

In Ellie news, I spent the morning in her kindergarten classroom after dropping off the other kids at preschool. It's something I've been meaning to do all year and finally got around to doing today! I have to admit, while it was hard to give up my "quiet time" I have on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when everyone is at school, it was fun to see what Ellie does at school every day. Her teacher is wonderful and put me right to work helping kids with reading, writing, and then after dividing up the class into 4 groups for different activities, put me in charge of working with one group of kids to identify and write "it" and "in" words. The first group of kids I worked with did great, coming up with words like sit, pit, kit, and pin, tin, and bin. After about 15 minutes, the groups rotated and the second group I had was Ellie's group. We went right to work on "it" words and most of the same words from the previous group had been named when Ellie suddenly stood up and said, "I know an 'it' word! You know, when you drop something, you say 'shit!'" I couldn't help but start to laugh and then couldn't stop laughing. Ellie, of course, just sat back with a little smirk.

Our non-winter has almost come to an end, but spring has unofficially sprung early with temps in the 60s and 70s and sunshine most of the week. We've been soaking up every minute of it, spending as much time as we can outside. Tonight we went for a nice long walk after dinner to the "duck pond", which is what the kids call the drainage ditch/holding pond in front of the high school behind us. Here are some photos from tonight and earlier this week, enjoy!