October 18, 2012
On Thursday evening I met with Matthew’s teacher, Mrs. Beard. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Matthew has been attending PreK classes for the Hearing Impaired since his 3rd birthday. Mrs. Beard has been his teacher for both of those years and now he is attending afternoon “mainstream” Kindergarten classes with Mrs. Beard assisting. For Matthew and the other hearing impaired kids they use an FM system that allows the teacher to be heard directly in the hearing aids. This year the class is especially full. There are more than 25 kids in the class and I was a little worried that Matthew might not get the attention he needs. From my conversation with Mrs. Beard I learned that Matthew is branching out, developing friends with new kids. Not only that but when Mrs. Beard asked Matthew to count as far as he could he very slowly and deliberately counted to 100. The standard is for kids to be able to count to 30 by then end of Kindergarten and Matthew hasn’t started Kindergarten yet because his birthday missed the cut off date by 5 days. Matthew also answered correctly many addition and subtraction questions with the use of props (ie. you have 15 toy monkeys here if I take these 2 away how many are left) and without props. Lastly, he knows all of his letters upper case and lower case. Mrs. Beard said that Matthew would be ready to start Kindergarten this year and will definitely be more than ready to attend mainstream classes next year.
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