The school year ends next week. At the moment, the last day is supposedly Wednesday, but the pre-K “moving up” ceremony is Monday, so we’re not entirely sure that the Monster actually has school after that.
It’s been an interesting year, that’s for certain. He’s been doing fine and keeping pace with his pre-academics, as they refer to the course load at his grade level, even if he’s not necessarily gaining much ground on the other skills that he’s delayed in.
Camp will start two weeks from Monday – giving us a week off – and the camp will be delivering the bulk of his ESY program. I don’t know that there’s much that they’re going to do with the special education portion of his IEP, but that’s really the least of our worries. (His teacher let us know which schools are delivering the special education portion, not that we’re sure how that would fit in with his camp.)
The one thing that’s been missing is really the decision on where he’s going next year for school. When we did the IEP in February, the discussion on where he would be this coming year was postponed, since the emphasis was on getting the ESY services in place. We realized, suddenly, that we’d never had any discussion on placement for the coming school year… and so I broached the topic when requesting a new copy of the IEP so we could forward it to the camp.
As we thought – as his teacher had told us she believed was going to happen – he’s going to be returning to the same school and the same class next year, as she’s moving along with the class to the kindergarten level.
I’m of two minds on this, really, but at the heart of it, he’s doing well in the classroom and it would certainly lower the curve for his being comfortable when he gets back to classes in August. He’s used to the bus ride from here to the school, which will be good for the bus rides to and from camp this summer, as well as when he resumes in the fall…
On the other hand, we’re going to have a down-week between school and camp, which will be time that we’re going to have to fill so that he’s not bereft of some kind of structure. It’d really be bad if, when school lets out, he got completely hooked again on television and the like while he’s waiting to go off to all the activities he’ll have at camp… and at least some of that is going to have to be reinforcing some of the reading and writing he’s doing at school now.
Time to break out the lesson books…