Sorry this is going to be a gushy post - I've just come back from spending the morning at my dds' school. I watched dd2 in class (she has DS and is in mainstream reception) - it was so lovely. she was working in a small group with a TA helping her and working with the other children in the group too. She did some lovely work - since starting school she has finally got the idea of drawing and now does faces, and today they were looking at light and darkness and she actually drew a flame onto a picture of a candle (well, it was just a scribble but in the right place). She tried to colour it in, too - 5 inches away from the candle but hey!
She is also trying to write her (rather long) name and does a neat line of scribbles into the top corner of her work.
She has two TAs (it's a jobshare) and they both said such lovely things about her - how well she fits in, how fantastic it is for the other children to have her there, that she is so well behaved... One of them said that it's been a real eye-openener for her and she knows that should she ever have a baby with DS she wouldn't mind.
I watched playtime, too - everybody made such an effort to involve dd in a natural way. They were skipping with a big rope held by a child at each end, and got dd to hold the end whilst a second person turned it.
It was so nice to watch. This is inclusion how it should be.