My grandson seems to have taken to school like a duck to water and his smiley, immature cuteness has made him a great favourite amongst the adults he deals with. His language is considerably less developed than is normal for a 4 year old, but he definitely isn't short of brain power. His mum and sister both have acute astigmatism and he had an eye test a few weeks ago, identifying pictures. The optician was bowled over when he answered "orca" and "tiger shark" instead of "whale" and "shark",which were the answers she was expecting. He is also very quick with puzzles of any sort
When he speaks, certain unimportant words just don't form part of his used vocabulary - to, the, and etc. However, he recognises all his letters and is good at phonics. He is demonstrating what I think is a very unusual phenomenon - his learning to read is actually teaching him how to speak in correctly-constructed sentences. I think all the textbooks on the theory of language development say that this is supposed to be the other way round.