Hello all, I have been having a great time reading and reading this board for weeks and finally decided to chime in and see if I could get some input on the dilemma that brought me here. This is going to be long, many thanks in advance to any of you who have the time to read it.
I have twin girls who will be 5 in August. We have had a pretty wild parenting ride so far! A is tiny for her age and has always been behind B in development. I have suspected B to be gifted since she was very young, based on her insatiable curiosity and ability to figure things out... we used to call her the Little Engineer around 18 months. But by age 2, both girls had lost most of their early speech. A wasn't talking at all and B only occasionally. I started the process to have them evaluated by EI, and while we were waiting, A started drifting further and further away from us and started several self-injurious behaviors.
Just before age 2.5, A was diagnosed with autism. By then, B had started talking and within about a month had accumulated a few hundred words, learned the entire alphabet within a couple of days, and developed one-to-one correspondence for counting up to around 10 items. I was completely distraught about A (could barely eat or sleep for weeks) but thought B was just fine. She had completely flunked her EI evals, however, due to refusal to interact with any of the evaluators except to check out their cool toys, so both A and B qualified for speech therapy and someone started coming to our house.
In discussing a major ramp-up in services for A, she mentioned that there would also be a spot for B in the preschool autism class. WHAT?!?!?! I had no idea they were thinking B was on the spectrum too. But the SLP pointed out that B had a huge vocabulary and essentially no pragmatic use of it... she went around labeling things all day but would just tantrum if she wanted to "ask" me for something. We reluctantly scheduled an autism eval for B, and she tested only a couple of points lower than her sister on the ADOS, definitely in the autism (not PDD-NOS) range.
I read a couple of huge stacks of books and decided to get a home ABA program going very quickly. 6 months later, B had progressed with everything so well that I was able to enroll her in a 3's preschool class 2 mornings a week with no one aware of her diagnosis. 12 months later I had both girls retested on ADOS and language. B tested off the spectrum on ADOS and her language had reached the average range, 60th percentile. A made a huge leap as well, her ADOS score was in the very mild PDD-NOS range, but her language was still in single digit percentiles.
We moved to the Washington DC area last fall and kept going with ABA. The girls were both in a typical preschool this year with no disclosure of the diagnosis. I was worried especially about A, as this was her first experience in a typical preschool environment, but as it turned out there were several kids in the class with issues a lot worse than ours (several with completely clueless parents), so it was fine for the most part. Until the end of the year, when B started refusing to sit for circle time and just generally giving the teacher a hard time. I figured this is evidence she is still socially immature and it gave support to the plan to wait an extra year to start K.
I had pretty much determined a couple of years ago to redshirt the girls for K. They were due in September, born early because they are twins, and given all the developmental drama we have dealt with, it seemed best to give them a little extra time to bloom before throwing them into school. Also, in this area it seems redshirting is very common, even for typically developing summer babies, so by putting the girls in on time, they would be the youngest by 15-18 months.
We are supposed to be going to a private pre-K in 6 weeks. Having spent the last couple of years almost exclusively focused on social development and language, I have been largely ignoring academic stuff for them. We knew that B could read quite a few words at 3, but weren't trying to follow that up; bigger fish to fry, so to speak.
Then we all got stuck together in the house for around 10 days in February with the major DC blizzard. After a few days we were desperate for something to entertain the girls. So I went online and found some reading and math programs that looked fun for a 4-year-old. Both kids loved getting to play on the computer for the first time, and started zooming through the reading. In math they placed out of most of the K curriculum and were doing 1st grade in a couple of days.
Even this did not dissuade me from the preK plan, especially with B kind of flipping out at school in May. When I see other girls a year older, they seem almost like teenagers to me in their social development. She has a really low frustration tolerance and has a hard time sitting still. Her attention span seems very short to me. I think if I had her reevaluated now, she would get an ADHD diagnosis. Also, around April, she lost all interest in reading and refused to even let me read to her for a few months. She just did not seem K ready to me at all.
But a couple of weeks ago, she suddenly started nosing back into the books, read a few Sandra Boynton ones, and then a few days later got out Little Bear and read the entire thing out loud. Also spontaneously started writing full sentences when given some paper to draw on. It seems like a bunch of things just clicked for her at once.
Now I am second guessing the school plan all over again and wondering if we need to do K.
1. The girls are twins and I really want to keep them in the same grade, but I think A could use an extra year. We have never approached our new school district for an IEP (seeking to minimize the "record" on the kids until they get to school and we can figure out where we are at that time).
2. B is still pretty immature, maybe Aspie, maybe ADHD; has residual "issues" that seem likely to cause problems in school.
3. B is reading 2nd grade books independently and doing 1st grade math. Even if I put her in K this year, they are not going to be working anywhere near on her level. PreK will be almost all fun and games, so probably not as boring? I can work with her on school type stuff at home. Then we could put her straight into 1st grade next year, as I read the state law.
4. A is reading and doing math beyond K as well, just not quite as advanced as B. A is very tiny, uncoordinated, and much more obviously spectrum-y, she still "zones out" a lot, especially in a crowd. Many kids one year older than her are twice her size.
5. DH is gifted (probably PG) and thinks we should put them in K this year and let the chips fall where they may. His mom turned down a grade skip for him and he still wishes she hadn't.
6. I am HG, a June b-day, and was socially miserable until college. I never could fit in with the other girls. I was hoping to spare my girls some of that by getting them closer in sync with other girls their age before starting school. But maybe that is just a losing battle...
Would greatly appreciate any thoughts on the wisdom/stupidity of redshirting a 2e kid.
