Showing posts with label transition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transition. Show all posts

Kindergarten Transition Time

It's that time of year at school, where my team gets together with our preschool team for transitions. I have found that even though it's a special education meeting, we spend most of the time talking about kindergarten looks like, smells like, and how it is different from preschool.
I like to think the my kindergarten team has set up something special. They have a full time para-professional plus both a special education and Title 1 reading specialist that go in for reading. We seem to be unique in this fashion. It helps us provide services in the room instead of pulling students out.

We work very hard with the preschool team to ensure that we get to know the student and their family. We want to make sure that the student is correctly placed in kindergarten-its a big move even with the adult support; having twice as many students than they are use to in preschool and having to stay all day can be hard. 

This year I created a hand out to give our incoming preschool parents, to give them some ideas about what they can do at home over the summer to help get ready for kindergarten. Because we can recieve a varity of student with a wide range of needs, I have other items that give to specific families where the preschool team thinks that coming to the "Big School" will be hard such as social stories and  before school visits in the fall. Many of our special education preschool students have syblings at our school and know it better I do. What else to your teams give out to parents to help them? I'd love to hear how other teams help preschool students and their parents transition into kindergarten.
Helping Your Child Get Off to a Good Start in Kindergarten

Kindergarten Here We Come!

Each year about this time, I start planning for the new kindergartens that are coming. The transition meetings are important for many reasons. I get a chance to meet new parents and in many cases the new kindergartner as well. The preschool team always plans on the meets lasting only 30 minutes but I have never had a transition meeting end on time. I usually end up doing most of the listening and answering as many questions that the parents have and we never hear from the preschool team. The preschoolers, always tell me that they are looking forward to coming to the "big school." I guess this makes sense because our preschool is right next door.

This year I'm giving my parents some concrete ideas of what they can do over the next 6 months at home. I have also given it my current kindergarten parents to help them build on what has been taught this year. How do you help parents get ready for moving into kindergarten?

Getting Ready for Kindergarten

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Welcome to my all thing special education blog. I empower busy elementary special education teachers to use best practice strategies to achieve a data and evidence driven classroom community by sharing easy to use, engaging, unique approaches to small group reading and math. Thanks for Hopping By.
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