Thursday, August 30, 2012

Kindergarten Open House


We went to visit Nolan's classroom this evening. His classroom is very colorful, with lots of centers. It is a great contrast to Matt's Kindergarten classroom, which was very sterile in many respects (and had few centers).

Nolan's teacher plays the piano and has one in her classroom. I really love the inclusion of music and center time into the kindergarten day. I didn't get a lot of pictures of his classroom, because I was talking to his Teacher of the Deaf. She had his new FM system set up and waiting.

I will have to return the county-provided FM system, which is sort of a bummer. On the other hand, the school district is allowing me to take his FM system home, so I consider this a big WIN.

We can still use it at home, and I will set it up each morning and take him to school with it on, just as I did last year. This worked well for us last year, so we'll keep doing it again this year.

I did tell his TOD that his reporting skills were hit-or-miss. If both hearing aid batteries die, he will always say something. Since he is functionally deaf without hearing aids, two dead batteries really impact him. If one battery dies, however, he won't say anything. As long as he can hear something, he figures he's still good to go. If the FM isn't working, he'll often insist that it is - until you fix it and turn it on, when he'll declare, "I can hear you now!"

Fortunately, he has hearing aids so his occasional failure to report malfunctioning equipment can be checked - we can listen through his hearing aid/FM combination to be sure it is set correctly.

School starts on September 5 - we're all excited for a great year!

3 comments:

Julia said...

A piano in the classroom??? How wonderful is that! I *like* this teacher. We got Ben's FM system set up this afternoon, but we didn't get a chance to walk around the school looking for interference or other problems. We're going to coach Ben a little on reporting, but we don't know how well that will work out.

Kyla said...

Awesome! Sounds like it will be a good year for him.

I'm crossing my fingers we can get an FM system approved for K this year!

Robin and Dan said...

I just recently came across your blog. Our son was a micro preemie, born at 1 lb, 6 oz, and ended up with a g-tube at 9 months. He vomited A LOT with g-tube feeds - like 6 to 8 times a day. He doesn't have the same issues with bloating that your son has, but I think just the method of feeding via g-tube makes some kiddos vomit. Also we found out by trial and error that he had an allergy to corn - he would get extremely constipated every time he ate anything with corn in it. And recently he was diagnosed with celiac disease. Just thought I would share our experience in hopes that it might help in some way. Did the docs do any allergy testing with your son? I wonder if the bloating could be from a milk allergy? I hope they get this figured out for him soon! Best of luck with everything!