Last day of Kindergarten reflections

Today is Kevin's last day of Kindergarten. It has been quite a year. Last year we prayed and pondered a lot about what to do about Kevin's school this year. His birthday is in July, so he made the cutoff for Kindergarten, but I worried a lot about whether he was ready. We considered an extra year of preschool (which we couldn't really afford) and homeschooling, but as time went on it was clear that the Spirit was telling us he should go to Kindergarten this year. Logically it didn't make any sense to me. He knew maybe half of the letter sounds and only a few of their names, the mere mention of writing and drawing would often trigger a nervous breakdown for him, and I worried that behavior was going to be a problem. Logically it made more sense to wait a year before putting him in public school. But whenever I thought about waiting it felt wrong. So we went for it.

To my amazement, Kevin picked up on handwriting and letter names and sounds very quickly. It didn't take long before he caught up. I think maybe it helped to see other kids writing and drawing, plus his teacher showed him how to draw people in a way that made sense for him. Now he can draw all sorts of things (and does so for fun quite frequently) and he writes sentences too.

Behavior was a problem for a while. He had a lot of problems on the bus and I found out that he was getting in trouble at recess and lunch too. That was when I finally looked into getting him into occupational therapy. I had been considering it ever since I first learned about sensory processing disorder when he was three, and the problems at school were a sign to me that we really needed to get help. Kevin's OT gave us a lot of suggestions to help him do better at school, and he also got an assigned seat on the bus, which was a big help to him because being uncertain about who would sit with him caused him a lot of stress. Going to therapy every week helped him to deal with his sensory problems and be more stable. We started seeing huge improvements in behavior.

At home we have seen big improvements too. There are still a lot of hard things, but he has calmed down a lot. I think having a routine at school was a huge help to him, and I couldn't have given him that kind of routine at home.

I was very upset for a while about the way they taught reading at Kevin's school. They started with a lot of sight reading and guessing based on the pictures, and I worried a lot about the bad habits that would cause him to develop. I felt that they should be starting with more phonetic reading. But listening to Kevin read some books this week, I realized that for Kevin it was a big help to learn all those sight words. While I loved the phonetic approach of the reading book we were using last summer, it was very frustrating to Kevin to have to sound out all of the words and take so long to read the stories. The nice thing about knowing so many sight words is that he can read much more quickly and confidently, and he's a lot more willing to sound out unfamiliar words because he is reading most of the words more quickly. It's not the way I would have chosen to teach him to read, but I think that for him it was a better method because he's not so frustrated.

So it's been interesting this year to see the effects of our choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost. It didn't make logical sense to send Kevin to Kindergarten, but God knew what Kevin needed better than we did. I'm so amazed at all of the things he has learned and the changes we have seen in him this year, and I'm grateful that we trusted our inspiration. The impression I kept getting was that he was ready for the things he was going to learn this year, and I think if we had waited a year we would have just delayed all of the progress he was going to make.