Hi, my name is Ms. Tracey and my co-teacher is Ms. Geneva. We teach VPK. Our success story has taken several months to transpire, but we would like to brag on our sweet little Jaydyn.

Cue, March 2020. As everyone else felt the fear of COVID19, many children were kept at home, with the prayers that COVID would not reach homes that sanitized, that quarantined, and made every precaution possible. Unfortunately, we saw those effects as our enrollment here at the Learning Pavilion dropped substantially. During that decrease in enrollment, Jaydyn spent March 2020 through August 2020 with his family. When precautions were made and safety protocols in place, parents finally felt safe having their babies return to school.

When Jaydyn first came into our VPK classroom in August, he was frightened and would respond physically out of frustration due to a limit in organic conversation skills. His friends did not always comprehend that he was trying to communicate with them, leading often times for Jaydyn to engage in solitary or parallel play. We, as his teachers, at times had difficulty understanding what Jaydyn’s needs were when he was upset or frustrated, and adjusted our classroom teaching style to guide Jaydyn into full social integration with his peers.

We decided the best way to assist Jaydyn with modeling appropriate and positive social interactions was to guide his peer interactions throughout each day, every day. This repetitive and intentional task on our part was dosed with praise and a ton of love.

Slowly, and with the help of our therapy team and his parents, Jaydyn began to become to display more positive interactions with his peers. Jaydyn’s vocabulary and organic speech skills have grown by leaps and bounds, and he will often verbalize what he wants and who he wants to play with.

Five months later, Jaydyn runs into the classroom with enthusiasm! As teachers of a 4-5 year old classroom, we take each day as it comes, but are so very pleased with the progress he’s made and continues to make. We are very blessed to have him in our classroom and we love him dearly!