Julia’s new school experience
We have just moved Julia to a new school mid year, and she started on Tuesday.
For the last 3 years we have felt that things were just not right with Jules. She has always been a confident bright kid , but things just started to change slowly.
In grade 1 in the mornings before school she would moan about her uniform not fitting properly or her hair would not look right, or she didn’t have the right crayons in her pencil case. It would be one thing after the other,she was also not showing any interest in all the wonderful extramurals she could do at school like ballet , music ,drama, swimming the list was endless which was strange for a kid that was great at singing , ballet and swimming.
I began to think that we really had a problem child .We started play therapy and tried to understand what the issues were, was she just a difficult kid, were we the problem, how could we change?
After 6 months of therapy and Julia resisting it every step of the way, the therapist recommended we change schools. I thought that was a bit drastic and didn’t want to even contemplate that and the school she was at was so nurturing. She had some nice friends and the other consideration was that it was so convenient around the corner from Hugo’s school . So we continued to look at Jules and wondered where we had gone wrong.
In grade 2 learning became a problem for her. She began to fall behind and this from a kid who started to read at nursery school! But, she loved her new teacher which was a big thing as she was completely terrified of her grade 1 teacher - things were not looking good.
After doing assessments and taking her to remedial and OT it became clear that a whole chunk of learning was missing . I was in shock …..this was really hard for me to comprehend - She had always been a bright kid I never thought she had learning problems.
But you know what I think it is a lot more complicated than that- I believe the environment was not right for her. The problems we were encountering every morning was a symptom , the cause was that she had lost her confidence and self esteem she was anxious and stressed and when you are in that state of mind you cannot learn anything .
I’m sorry we didn’t do it sooner. We moved her and you cannot believe this is the same child! She skips into school every morning , she hasn’t complained about her hair or uniform. It’s early days but the signs are good….every kid is different and I have learnt that it is really important to match your child to the right school - they all require different things and to learn they need to feel supported