2017-18 End of Year Assessment: Brother

This was Brother's Kindergarten year. 

Social/Emotional Growth:
Brother is both growing and struggling in many ways.

He is intolerant of correction.

But he's also very humble and willing to take correction.

He's a study in extremes.

He is bossy with younger siblings, talks back to older siblings, and tells Sir Walter Scott and me that we're doing our jobs as parents all wrong.

Oddly, though, it is clear he means no harm . . . because he's also compassionate, ready to help, and prays the most caring prayers I've ever heard from a child his age.

It's that extreme swing again.

His challenging behaviors are not endearing, and most of the family walks around with clenched fists and clenched jaws trying not to take out their anger on Brother.  We often counsel in small groups about working to love Brother in spite of his behaviors. 

We often fail.

But, oh, how we're trying!

His tantrums are of shorter duration and more rare than they've ever been, but he's substituted passive-aggressive behavior in their place.

He wants to solve problems.  He does a great job with building toys, crying far less this year than last over Legos or puzzles that won't go together right.  When it comes to resolving conflict with siblings, he still resorts to primal screaming or whining.  However, with reminders, he can pull himself together and use words--even if we have to feed the words to him so he can repeat them.

He also causes a lot of problems with the quietest of quiet teasing.  100% of the time, when a sibling has hauled off and hit Brother, we have found that he's taken something, said something, or pressed an issue mercilessly.  And he takes pleasure in every outburst he causes--smiling and cocking his eyebrows with satisfaction.  But his Primary (children's ministry) teacher at church reports that he is the sweetest and mildest of children, and his therapist reported the same.

He's shy, but he loves deeply, and he makes friends with other kids.

His attention span is reasonable for a child of his age, and his ability to be polite in a group setting far exceeds that of other children his age, but whether he chooses to exercise his ability in a given situation is still rather iffy.  He's scrupulously polite in public, less so at home, but overall, he truly tries.

He is very interested in fairness, and that's what often gets him in trouble; he complains and interferes with plans for children of various ages when he feels what we're doing isn't fair.

For him, fair = same.

We're working hard to teach him that different children have different needs, but he cannot see that, and he's often angry about it.  He does not trust us to do what is right for him or anyone else in the family, and he either intervenes to change what we've done or he tells us what we need to do.

He wants to be right all of the time.  He will dig his heels in and claim he is right even when clear evidence is given to the contrary.  When he can't refute the evidence, he looks for loopholes and comforts himself with semantics.

Removing him first from the bedroom he shared with Mister Man then from the bedroom he shares with Beowulf and putting him in the music room to sleep alone has solved at least half of our family sleeping issues.  (But he's rapidly outgrowing the couch in that room!  A new solution must follow shortly.)

He performs 2 chores each day--tidying the living room in the morning for the daily vacuuming and tidying the kitchen floor for the evening sweeping.  While he is capable of and takes pleasure in sorting toys for play, the same is not true of sorting items for cleaning.  Regularly (daily!), he comes to me asking what he should do with a piece of used paper or trash when family routines for taking care of those things are clear and established.  On the flip side, he'll take an odd item like a sister's sewing project and throw it away without asking any questions at all.

Even though his ability to perform his chores is spotty, he is conscientious about doing them.  He cares about contributing and helping.  He's always first out the door to help carry in groceries; he jumps to offer sympathy to someone who is hurt; he offers to help with odd jobs often.

He is able to work independently quite well as long as he remembers the instructions he's been given.  He likes getting assignments for school, and workbooks are immensely satisfying for him.  He prefers independent work to group work.  He can persevere at any task that seems important to him; I'm learning to just close my mouth and let him try because he does not accept counsel.

His speech is perfectly clear.  He speaks in organized sentences unless he's trying to gather information on an unfamiliar subject, and then nouns and adjectives will escape him.  He often comes to me with questions such as, "What is that . . . that . . . umm . .  . that thing . . . that I saw that one time?"  If I ask him what color it is or what shape it is or where he saw it or the context for what he's talking about, he rarely can answer, and that leads to frustration for us both.

But here's that extreme swing again--he can sometimes tell a story about visiting a family member or the zoo with perfect recall and with understandable order.

Brother truly wants to be kind and good and helpful.  His struggle is that his efforts often go wrong, and when we offer correction, he feels badly and gets angry.  His anger results in passive-aggressive behavior toward us as parents or teasing siblings, and then he gets in trouble.  There's enough trouble that he's giving up--he feels like a bad person who is of no use.  I'd like to figure out how to halt this cycle and help him see that he is kind and good and helpful.

Intellectual Growth:
Brother is very bright.  He is mechanically/mathematically minded, and he cares about learning.  He struggles with an inconsistent ability to draw upon and use his knowledge.

His ability to contribute to a group lesson swings markedly from day to day.   He may listen, narrate, and share thoughts with perfect clarity on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, he might not be able to even stay in his chair, much less listen or remember, and he'll talk over the teacher, wiggle, fall out of his chair, and disrupt the lesson as much as he can.  Then on Thursday, he'll be back in top form.  It's quite hard to know what is an organic problem and what is a behavioral problem.  I think we need to treat all of it as organic and offer support and sympathy as a given on "off" days.

He knows all of the alphabet names and sounds (short vowel sounds only).  He began a simple phonics program, and he memorized a dozen or so sight words.  He did fine as long as the reading stuck to C-V-C words or C-V-C-C words.  As soon as C-V-C-e words and vowel combinations were introduced, it became too much, and brother couldn't cope.  Part way through the school year, I put away the Eclectic Foundations book he was using, and backed off.  We played memory games to help him solidify his C-V-C knowledge and keep his sight words within his grasp.

He reads better in isolation than in context.  He'd rather read a list of words than a story because a list requires only decoding skills while reading a story requires decoding and comprehension skills; he cannot handle both simultaneously.   It will be interesting to see if our summer rest gives his brain time to grow into reading stories or if it will be a long-term challenge.

He's just begun to understand rhymes, and he's very proud when he identifies one.  Coming up with a rhyme is harder, but he can do it about 50% of the time.

 He's quite good at identifying beginning sounds and naming words that start with a given letter.  He's good at ending sounds, too.  And he can isolate middle sounds (short vowels) in C-V-C words.

He loves to write his name.  He can write his first name completely independently, and he can write first, middle, and last with a visual prompt.  He likes to copy words, and he likes to try to sound words out for his own writing purposes.  (Due to the amount of damage he's done to our home by using writing implements in places other than paper, he's only allowed to write or color during school time.  I hope to lift this ban sometime soon, but he's I'm not ready yet.) 

His favorite thing to draw is a van--like the one we drive.  He just barely tolerates our group drawing sessions, and then as soon as there's some freedom, he fills the page with vans.  He draws vans in the sand at the beach, sculpts vans out of playdough, constructs van "drawings" out of rocks, leaves, sticks, and other loose parts.  This has been a passion for the entire year, and it shows no signs of changing. 

He's a careful, deliberate artist; he needs at least twice as much time to complete a project as any of the other kids in our home.  He loves to fill the page with lots of details--some related to the theme, but most not (i.e.  We did drawings about Vikings when we studied them this past year.  He happily drew a dragon boat, and he carefully drew waves and fish and whales and Vikings with spears, but then he also put vans in the sky and covered everything with smoke and added wheels to the boat and grass to the water and so on).

 He is very, very happy to have quiet time come back this summer, and he spends long hours with building toys, designing and creating as long as I'll let him (mostly vans).  Often when I call an end to quiet time he'll ask, "Do I have to, or can I stay here?"  Whenever I can, I let him stay.

He loves numbers!  He counts and sorts and organizes and designs constantly.   I know I've heard him rote count to 100.  He counts objects with good accuracy, too.

He can identify patterns as long as he's given enough time to study the sample and a few prompts for how to name what he sees.

He understands the concepts of addition and subtraction.  He likes being given simple number sentences to solve in his head.  Sometimes he uses his fingers, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes he's able to visualize the problem and solve it without a concrete manipulative.

He's very interested in how things work.  Unfortunately, this leads to lots of broken things--so, so, so, so much breaking.  And the things don't always belong to him, so even though he means well, the results are very challenging.

He's curious about the world around him.  He cares about seeing what is to be seen and touching what can be touched.  He does not like listening, but he does tune into the sounds around him--from a bird call to an insect buzz to an engine growl.

He likes facts.

His concept of time seems age appropriate--limited to concrete experiences such as "before lunch" or "after breakfast" or "Sunday is the day we go to church."   He's memorized the days of the week and the months of the year.  He will often ask, "When will it be time for _____________?"  and if I tell him what day it will happen and what day it is when he asks, he can recite and count the days correctly.

He loves music.  He sings and sings and sings and sings and sings.  He damaged his vocal cords from so much tantruming over the years, so his voice is hoarse, but that does not stop him from singing.  In addition, Nature Angel has begun to show him how to pick out melodies on the piano, and he will sit for long periods of time working out songs.

He plays imaginatively given the right source of inspiration.  He really enjoys raiding our costume bin.  A favorite sentence is, "It would be fun if _____________."  (And here's an odd thing:  He can really imagine and communicate what he's imagining clearly!  Why does he have such a hard time asking clear questions, when he can describe long pretend stories with no problem?)

Jokes often elude him.  He's incredibly literal.

His gross motor skills continue to be one of his greatest strengths.  He's an amazing bike rider, runner, climber, and jumper. 

In Summary:
Brother is a good student with a lot of challenging behaviors.  He's quite bright, and he's quite confused.  He wants to learn and grow.  He cares about others, and he's a fighter.  I think he had a happy and satisfying Kindergarten year.  He likes school.  I have deep concerns about his emotional growth, but writing about it here has helped me see that he's grown more than I was aware in our day-to-day living.  I am quite happy with his academic accomplishments.