Thank you everyone for your responses, much appreciated.
Our son's quirky personality is probably what we consider the biggest wild card in this decision making process. As previously mentioned (in another thread, I think), he has ongoing psych appointments to help deal with perfectionism and learn to self-regulate his intense emotional reactions. This in itself is enough to make me want to give the school a heads up. However, the somewhat perplexing thing is that these intense reactions rarely take place outside our home - it's like he bottles everything up until he's safely with us, then absolutely explodes. I'm certain that the preschool staff would think I was joking if I told them, as according to them he 'always has great days - pleasure to have in the group'.
My daughter had behavioral issues at home, but was a peach at school. Well...because she didn't speak at all at school. She was selectively mute. But also gifted. Because of the selective mutism, we didn't rush to accommodate for that because if she couldn't speak in school, there would be no use in pushing her forward academically.
We focused instead on the mutism and the anxiety at school. She actually has an IEP for that. I worked on emotion coaching her at home using social stories.
But, we prepared her so well for this year, that she's made a huge breakthrough and spoke on the first day of classes and actually made some friends.
She did so well that when it came time to do initial reading assessments for her last week in kindergarten, she tested at a second grade reading level. She will be placed in a higher reading group and given challenging books to read for her take home books.
They differentiate the reading instruction, and sometime they will also differentiate the math instruction too (it's in the testing phases).
The wait and see approach has turned out better than I'd hoped it would.
