Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The Mystery Keeper: Preschool and Kindergarten

This picks up where the last post left off.
I started preschool two months before my fourth birthday.  I barely remember since I was so little, but I liked it.  I liked the books there and I've been told they had big stuffed mice. I have a me book from then and there's this picture of a ride-in toy bus. I remember a trip to the quarry and the me book has a picture of us at the fire station. I'm demonstrating the stop drop and roll in it. 

Since I live in a rural area, we had a preschool teacher come to the house, but I visited the center once a month.  I was excited and danced around when the teacher came. I think I was all amped about her bag, but my mom thinks it was her, too.  My mom had surgery this year and my dad took care of me then.  I was diagnosed with Asperger's when I was four, but one of the preschool people didn't think I was due to my affectionate ways. I was a happy autistic kid, like some kids I've read about on other blogs. I could read some at 4, example being stop signs. I had no language delay but I had trouble with sentence structure. Sometimes I made nonsense sentences.  I went to a center to be diagnosed. It had toys and a gym, where I've been told I rode a tricycle. Mostly I had coordination problems. I played what they call parallel but at the end of the year, when I was about 4.5, I was starting to play with other kids outside.

Due to my age and hyperactivity, my mom wanted me in Begindergarden. I tested too good on my Kindergarten Screening due to my cognitive abilities.  I started in a special Kindergarten and first grade class at one of local elementary schools.  It was the one in the district with therapies for kids like me at the time. I made a little friend a few months older than me named Kellie.  I was big for my age and she was little, so she was thought to be the younger of us, though you know that wasn't the case.  She had to wear a helmet for seizures.  We rode the bus together.  We were the only ones on our bus.  As kindergarteners, we were half-day unless there was a party. I was Barney for Halloween.  I decided I didn't like chocolate milk one of those days we stayed all day.  They thought I might need to repeat kindergarten, but I tested too good academically, third grade reading level at 5.5, which was how old I was at the end of the year.

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad you were happy. I think back to my Jack when he was this age and he was totally a happy guy too. It's a really happy memory. :)

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  2. I thought of Jack when I wrote that happy bit in there. He's under the umbrella of kids I read about on other blogs.

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