Email sent

jlw2505

DH and I and my DD's Pre-K teachers all agreed that holding her back a year is going to be the best step for her - she is a June b-day with a Sept cut-off date and she has a severe speech delay (in therapy for it and its been great and is helping).   We decided this at her fall conference last month but I had not brought myself to send in the official email to all the parties involved for whatever reason.  I know in every sense that having her start Kindergarten a year later is the right thing to do for my DD but I still feel sad that all of her friends will start this fall and she won't.  Anyway - I finally did it and sent the email on Tuesday.

For those that have held their kids back a year, how did you explain it to them.  I guess this question is more for those with kids who were in a preschool/PreK program where they did a graduation ceremony or just were a lot of your childs friends would be starting kindergarten but yours would not be.  I am going to talk to her teachers closer to the spring to see what they suggest as I just want to this to be a positive thing for my DD.  She already has such a hard time due to her speech that I don't want her to feel bad.

mlm1128

DD has a November birthday, and we have a December cut off.  We decided that she would not start kindergarten until next year when she is 5 going on 6.  She was fine in pre school academically, butt she was really shy.  We jsut told her that some of her friends would be going on to a different school, but she was going to go back to her school and make new friends.  We also told her she would be the "big" giel in class and she would be able to help the new kids.

It was seriously the best thing we could have done.  Last year at her Christmas show she had red cheeks the whole time, kept her head down and basically lip synched. Yesterday she was the first one on the stage, sang out loaud, had a "solo" and used the microphine at the end of the program to thank everyone for coming.  She's totally come out of her shell and will go into kindergarten a lot more confident.