The Back-to-School Cheat Sheet

Tomorrow James starts school as a first grader. First, I take a moment (or maybe a week) to pause and reflect -- it seems like yesterday that it was his Big Sister who was starting first grade. How little I knew then and how far we've come.

For his second year as a full-inclusion student, I worked on a cheat sheet for James. I don't know what else to call it -- I basically take one piece of paper and fill it with information to introduce our son to his team at school. I did this last year after months of freaking out about our son moving from 2.5 years of Special Day Preschool to a mainstream Kindergarten. I tell you, I can still feel my anxiety now, recalling it.

I wanted to make sure the same information was available to his teacher, full-inclusion aide, speech & language teacher, O/T, Adaptive PE coach, and Services Coordinator. I thought something written would be nice to be able to reference, should the need arise.

For both years, I put his name at the top, followed by the names of his family team and our phone numbers plus my email. Then I wrote a 1-3 quick paragraph summary of what our son has done over the summer.

I used bullet points to talk about what he likes, does not like, and needs help with (such as he needs help with focusing, he loves music and the colour red, but is sensitive to noises like blenders and non-service/companion dogs make him very anxious).

Bullet points are also good ways to lay out James' strengths and challenges. I try not to go into too much detail because what I am trying to do is make an introduction from a parent's POV, not write a case study for someone who's worked with kids for longer than I have.

If there were allergies or daily meds to report, I'd have listed them here too. I touched briefly on how we discipline our son (time outs) and some key strategies that have worked to keep him on track. I made sure to say that the teacher can call or email me if needed.

His team has told me that they found this to be helpful, so it seems to have been a good idea. I wonder how many other parents have done this for their kids?