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Hi,

Her K readiness class sounds like a fishbowl with 6 goldfish and 3 greedy piranhas. I don't see how that ratio or their goals mimic a K environment at all. A K teacher may well be focused on enough other things they basically ignore minor infractions like an otherwise smart girl who makes faces or attempts to startle another child (unless it becomes a real pattern).

Having been asked for an opinion, I would say take her out and spend the next 3 weeks trying to convince her she is as wonderful as she always was, that she is not the behavior problem people have been telling her she is. Separate her from her occasional behaviors. Yes those particular moments were bad choices but she is basically a very well behaved kid. She is capable of showing excellent behavior so just expect she will in the future. For the moment keep her with people with whom she does well. Let her breathe for a few weeks and have a chance to enter K without having just practiced being mean to kids.

DS would get out of the pre-K we later pulled him from and I would ask him how it went and he would refuse to talk. He is very excitable and even more impatient and he got in trouble for things like talking over the teacher or not sitting criss cross apple sauce. I would say, "Did you poke anyone's eyes out?" He would say no. I would say, "Well they must have at least called an ambulance". He would say no. "Did you take a chair and beat the teacher with it?" Etc. And finally he would laugh and I would say that it sounded like he did great, and hand him his juice box and we would go do something more fun.

I encourage you to take this humorous take on it with your DD, for the beginning of K. Be on her side. And I encourage you to see it more humorously yourself -- she is 5 and there is a reason worldwide structured schooling starts around 6. Yes most girls are probably ready at 4 but not every single one. Few 10 year olds yell at others for not playing house the right way. So somewhere in there they grow up a little. Yes behavior experts disagree with me but they are basing their opinions on an average, on the general population, and what you have is so very far from the general population, she is a very bright girl capable of great insight and frustrated with all sorts of things that are beyond her control. Thinking far more thoughts per minute than most of the experts.

Tell her you agree the child didn't understand how to play house properly and you can imagine you might have yelled at them too if you were in her shoes. Or that it does sound unfair the other child wanted the scissors or that they wouldn't take her suggestion even though it does sound brilliant. Only in the barest way condone the teacher's response. Make it so that unless someone really did get seriously injured that you don't think she did much wrong. Set the bar very low. Draw the line at actual injurious physical aggression.

Otherwise, just acknowledge that yes that was probably something that would be upsetting to a teacher, in a matter of fact neutral way. There is a real difference between what is acceptable to a parent and what is acceptable to a random assortment of teachers. Don't attempt to have premonitions about what would set off her new K teacher. Do you personally care if she disrupted the class from counting pennies when they've been counting pennies every day for the whole year? No, deep down not really. So don't say you do. It's a real learning curve about what upsets a teacher, they are really all different and each classroom is different. So make sure she is clear what is okay with you and what is not, and set that bar so low that she has very little trouble jumping over it.

I think our job is not to toe the party line. Our job is to think long term and raise a child that will always tell us the truth about what happened at school that day. The teacher doesn't deeply care if she tells you the truth or how their comments affect your whole family's weekend. They care that they felt a bit scared when they saw her holding up scissors and snarling at another child. Our job is to nod to the teacher and say oh how upsetting in a empathetic voice, and then go home and tell our child that it sounds like they had a frustrating day but that it's great no one was injured, feed them a cookie and go to bed, get up and encourage them to use their words that day or maybe not play house if it is something that ends up upsetting them. If it feels like a run on sentence it is.

And then over time we try to give them general principles, maybe role play or talk about how to express themselves in a more mature way. Maybe with words, for example. The "Man she really did that with the doll? That makes no sense!" "Lets brainstorm and think how to respond next time so you don't get in trouble for yelling again. What else could you have done?" is a tried and true tactic. I'm sure you have and wonder why it hasn't worked yet and it has nothing to do with you, it almost certainly is that your DD is wired to react without thinking too deeply about it. That being the executive control part.

We can compliment them on the times they do act mature. We can brag about them with them in earshot about specific things they did that show us they can act mature because that is a way bigger compliment than just to their face. We can try to avoid them being in a setting with unfair expectations (if they have poor self control then that's a different setting than if they have good self control).

For my DS6 public K did not appear to be a good option. We kept him in his preschool which had a K, they were a playbased preschool that called his intensity "passion", they were wonderful with him and expected very little but by and by a little more, and he did very well there. I am so thankful it existed and that we happened to find it. If it had been a worse fit then K probably would have looked like a better option, but he was happy at the preschool so we thought it a safer bet for him to stay.

At about 5.5 I thought there might be some chance that some day in his teens maybe he would get to go to a regular school. Right around when he turned 6 I started to think it would go okay if only he'd get the perfect teacher. And now at 6 and some months I think most any teacher next year in public 1st grade will actually tolerate him. As much as I would like to compliment his preschool teachers I think it was more just time that's made him more ready for a large group type setting.

We really liked Transforming the Difficult Child workbook that Grinity suggested. We implemented mainly the part where you compliment the child on all the mundane things one usually takes for granted. Closing the door when they come in, taking off their shoes where they are supposed to. It's endless, the rules we want kids to follow and most do almost all of it. It really helped us see how obedient DS actually was trying to be. And then the other part of the book we put into practice was a long list of specific expectations and clear rules. Lots of no this and no that under headings like "respect for others" and "everyone helps". We use time outs occasionally but more just remind him when he breaks a rule. He's a good kid who has lot of frustrations and an immense ability to escalate his energy level in seconds.

I felt like by getting DS more on our side, or put another way by making him feel like we had complete faith in him through relentlessly complimenting things he had forgotten he chose to do, that he opened himself up more to working on things that are hard for him. He had been very oppositional with most everyone but is barely so at this point.