She continues to argue that his coloring is below level, wants me to hold him back for coloring and hand weakness because he has no "stamina". She's even taken DS's coloring pages and finished them for him so he could "have pretty work too."
My goodness I might laugh if someone said that to me about my kids. Coloring scmoloring. I remember being chastised for my coloring outside the lines in K (one of my few K memories) and it had no impact on my life whatsoever (yeah, I have bad handwriting but so what; I think that ds6's handwrighting is now better than mine after finishing OT, LOL - he writes in cursive thanks to his montessori K teacher).
The idea of redshirting really gets under my skin, though it doesn't seem to be a big deal where we live so it hasn't had a direct impact on us at this point. And sometimes I get concerned for the few cases in which it might sound reasonable that those particular ones were not checked for LDs. But mainly I feel that it overemphasizes "social" skills (which means so many different things to different people) since that seems to be the primary reason kids get redshirted, leaving academics playing second fiddle. I read random posts on various websites about people worried about their child's skills as compared to a kindergartener when they may have six months or a year before K would even start, which doesn't seem very fair to the child (talk about the "gift of time").
Maybe the biggest reason it gets under my skin is that my ds6 (just turned 6) could possibly have been the poster child for redshirting, looking prospectively from preschool. He had serious speech and fine motor delays - could not write or hold a pencil correctly. He was ahead in math in preschool but reading was a distant dream - he didn't even know the sounds of all the letters. He had no friends and was very, very introverted. He has trouble with transitions. He is very small (38 lbs). But he got the help he needed in K and is now achieving above grade level, including in reading/language, despite the fact that he still has speech issues significant enough to continue therapy for another year. What if I didn't know any better? What if his teacher hadn't shared my faith in him? What if I listened to those chattering voices on the internet and I wanted to be trendy? omg, the idea of him being in preschool and starting K this fall, instead of first grade as he will be, would be heartbreaking - he's quite the late bloomer but all morning he was working on a supposed first-grade language arts workbook just for fun (until he noticed that the cover said something about grade 1, at which point he started erasing, saying he would have to wait till August lol). I hate to think what it would have done to his love of learning, which seems to be accelerating a little more every day. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but holding him back from K would have made no sense looking at where he is now.
