Keeping up in Kindergarten

As you all know, Brycen spends a good portion of his day in the kindergarten room with his typical developing peers with the assistance of a 1:1 associate.  When we originally requested this, our intentions were for him to hopefully gain some speech and social skills training from being around his peers...as well as build awareness among the younger generation that having disabilities doesn't always mean you have to be separated from the bunch.  I think Brycen is overall succeeding in all of these areas and from what I have seen and heard, all of the other kids just see Brycen as himself.  I love that!!

What we weren't expecting with Brycen beginning kindergarten is for him to be able to keep up with the majority of the educational aspect of kindergarten.  Kindergarten is so much more advanced these days...they are reading simple books, counting to 100 (and counting by 10's!), and learning far more than I can ever remember knowing about kindergarten.  The teachers and associates keep us up to date very well on Brycen's progress and his worksheets are sent him on a regular basis for me to see what they are doing. 

When I visited the school last week (purpose was to actually fix his "talker"), the special education teacher was working with Brycen on "number sentences" using dominos.  What an awesome tool to use!  Of course, convincing Brycen to start doing his "work" is the hard part...but once he gets started he seems to fly right through it!  Before I left, he had then ventured back over to the kindergarten room with his associate where they were working on math as well.  This time, the kids were given a worksheet to fill in to work on number sentences that equal 6. 

Here is what Brycen's completed work-sheet looks like:

With the help of the associate, Brycen would "roll" his colored beans and then count how many were red, color that many in a box, count how many were blue, color that many in the box and then form a number sentence from that.  I'm sure you can see that Brycen is actually writing his numbers as well...with the help of the associate in some of the boxes, but he clearly wrote the top right number sentence himself of 3 + 3 = 6. 

I never ever expected Brycen to be able to keep up with his peers in these areas!  I know it takes him longer to complete these things and he needs an associate at all times to keep him on task and to show him what to do, but he has come so much further just in the last 6 months than we were thinking he would come in a couple years.  Originally, we were thinking about having him repeat kindergarten but I'm not so sure that is going to be necessary depending on his progress we received from his next IEP in May.  I'm confident he will continue learning (at his own pace, though it doesn't seem to be very far behind) and though he may not be able to talk to us about things, it is obvious that he is taking in more things around him than we ever imagined.