Transition to Kindergarten

We had our IEP meeting for the transition to kindergarten yesterday. I have to say that I think it went very well! I hear so many people complaining about their IEP teams and having a hard time with their meetings, but I feel like things generally go very smoothly for us.

The new team at the elementary school seems very on-the-ball. We don't know her teacher assignment yet, but a representative kindergarten teacher came to the meeting, as well as a representative from the EC classroom (EC= Exceptional Children = what we call special ed here). The speech therapist and OT were there as well. The PT couldn't come, but was available by phone when we had a question for her. All of the players seemed to work well together, and even chimed in on things that weren't necessarily in their own domains. I feel really good about the team.

We were able to get pretty much everything that we wanted from the meeting. We had been asking for them to give her OT for a while, and now they have agreed to that. They added a PT goal that I asked for after calling the PT by phone to ask her about it. They added academic goals that I tried to get at our last meeting 3 months ago, but couldn't get until now. They also approved of our idea to have her go to all 3 days of staggered entry instead of just the typical 1 day, which would basically give her the first day of school 3 times in a row for reinforcement.

They want to start her off with a lot of pull-out time to the EC room, which was not what I expected. I thought they would push someone in instead, but they explained that at least for now they want to see how she will do in a smaller group for that work. So she is going to have 30 minutes each for reading, writing, and math in the EC room 4 days per week. And on top of that she has 1 PT, 1 OT, and 2 speech per week. So while that does seem like a lot of time out of her classroom, I do agree that it is a good plan for now and we can re-assess later.

Kindergarten starts in just 6 weeks for us (year-round school) and we are excited! Not that I think our developmental day preschool experience has been bad, but I think that the level of service she will get in elementary school will be even better, based on this meeting.