Caden's Kindergarden School

This is Alden Primary school, in Alden , NY. this is where Caden will be in a 6:1:1 class for kindergarden for the upcoming school year. Last week, Caden and I had the opportunity to tour the school. It was the day after the classes ended, so no students were in the building and the rooms were in the process of either moving, or clean up, but we got a good feel for it. The school is huge and most of it's brand new. I really enjoyed it, and really like the Special Ed. teacher that took us on the tour, unfortunatly she is moving schools, and wont' be there next year, so we didn't get to meet his teacher, but before we know it september will be here anyway! Because students were gone, we were able to take pictures, so I could make some social story pictures chains to better prep him. I gave him total control of the camera, so please excuse the blurry pictures, but these are the things that HE wanted on his picture board.

This is obvioulsy the cafeteria. The special needs kids DO eat with the typcial kids, I am concered about this, only becuase the amount of people in one spot at one time, and the amount of noise involved in the setting. If it ends up to be too overwheleming for him, they will move him somewhere else to eat.

This is one of the playgrounds. this picture was taken from the inside of the awesome air conditioned library!

Posing on the colored risers in the music room. this was by far his favorite room to be in. He really enjoyed touching all the different muscial instruements. the risers were all different colors, red and yellow that you can see here and green and blue. So perfect for these little guys! it made the room so fun!

This is the gym. The kids once again do an intergrated gym class with the typcial children, but they close the wall, so it's only 1/2 the size of the gym, which is good.

This room WILL be caden's room next year. The teachers were in the process of changing rooms, so they had stuff everywhere, this was only 1/2 of the room, it turned out really dark becuase of the bright sun. That's caden in the back there, trying on some LARGE sunglasses!!

This is the kindergarden wing/common area. All the kindergarden classes surround this awesome common area in a circle, it's SUPER neat! And air conditioned as well. Cadens class does NOT surround this becuase his is a BOCES room. So that's a bummer, but they will still use the space at times as well.

There were also 3 or 4 courtyards. The school is a HUGE square, with a bunch of hallways going through the middle to create these great outdoor green spaces/courtyards that they use. The one, I really like and wanted a picture of, but caden didn't. It was the alphabet garden. Along the walls, they had each letter of the alphabet and under it, planted were flowers that began with the letter representing it. It was REALLY neat!

I really enjoyed the tour and loved the school. Hopefully this will be the only year that he'll have to be here though and can transition to our home school district for 1st grade.