Reply to Katherine Thomas Preschool

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Katherine Thomas Preschool"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]We were in a very similar situation -- wanted adequate academics combined with social support -- and we attended KTS from pre-K through 1.  It worked out extremely well for us, and we would highly recommend KTS based on our own experience.

The pre-K speech pathologist was phenomenal.  And honestly, pre-K academics are largely about learning how to conduct oneself in a classroom, and KTS did very well with that.  DC learned how a classroom functions and how to participate enthusiastically and with confidence in group learning.

DC is now in a mainstream school and doing extremely well, and we credit KTS in large part for preparing DC.

On the academics vs social support balance, two thoughts:

1) KTS stressed to us that the most important thing for future academic success is garnering the social cognitive tools to be able to learn in the classroom -- much more than the academic content itself, at least at early ages.  We were a little skeptical at first, but we became believers.  You can catch up on academic content later if the cognitive groundwork has been laid, but at some point you won't be able to do well academically if it hasn't.
2) In terms of academics we thought pre-K and K were fine at KTS.  We were less happy with 1st grade, DC was in a K-1 class and wound up reviewing a lot because there was no academically matched 1st grade peer.  And frankly, the teacher wasn't quite as good in terms of sharing our strong academic expectations. That year wasn't great for us academically but pre-K and K were solid.

My recommendation is to lean on the side of getting more social support early, over academic advancement.  In our case we feel very comfortable that going there for pre-K and K was a very good move, in fact indispensable for equipping DC for mainstream school success.  I would not have wanted to transition any later than we did (1st grade heading into 2nd) and an argument could be made that we should have done it earlier given the 1st grade academics.

I'd have no qualms about highly recommending KTS for pre-K and K.  1st grade would depend on the child and readiness to move on.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics