Right from age 2 there was no way my daughter was going to be Ok with separating from me for nursery. that was OK, we told our concerns to the health visitor who simply said, kid's separate naturally at different ages, don't worry about it. We were fine with skipping nursery until she was ready, but that readiness didn't seem to be forthcoming, in fact the opposite was true, she was struggling more and more with play groups, and all our gradual plans did not help at all!
Somewhere between 3 and 4 we started exploring home education activities in our area. Plenty of families have smalls as well as school age children so I was encourged to go along. What I found blew my mind. I knew a couple of homeschooling families (that honestly had put me off homeeducation - but that's a tangent I'm not going down right now) and they bought curriculums and their children sat down and were educated as formally, if not more so than a school. So finding families with a range of flexibility was interesting. I had my doubts about any child truly learning that way.
At this stage we didn't appreciate Miss A's needs, (I'll write another day about our understanding PDA journey another day) but one of the main things that happened as we were just starting to understand she might have demand avoidance was me trying to support her to improve her pen grip. I thought I was being calm and gentle, although in hindsight I think there were underlying tones of frustration - after all if she'd just do it my way she'd have much more control over that pen and she'd be less frustrated too! What happened next was a total mark making refusal. It lasted the best part of a year. She totally stopped, colouring/drawing, using a stick in mud, anything!
It was like a serious blow to me, I realised that it was my reaction, my stress about my daughter needing to write her own name like the kids in nursery would be practising every day that caused her refusal. If I'd just allowed her to do it her way...
As I write this she'd now be in year 1, she can not write her own name without help, tho I pleased to say she actually asked for help to write it a couple of weeks back. The last few days she's been obsessed with chalk and whiteboard markers! As she walks around the house finding things she's allowed to create art on, of course paper isn't an appropriate medium. She gave me a drawing lesson on the drive and then hyperfocused on colouring every single border stone around our drive. The run back and forth for a different chalk colour, definitely kept the activity fresh. (I have no idea why she only wanted 1 chalk each out front at a time, but hey extra moevement is good!) She did ask for help so I coloured a few too.
Mentally it can be hard on me to unschool to let go of comparing her to her peers, for me to grab her interest and help her run with it (she's asked to learn to read too, so there's me suddenly taking a crash course on phonics and printing half a tree off twinkl) but she's happy and she's progessing. I have every faith she'll be writing like a pro when she's ready, same with reading!
I'll leave you a few photos of this morning's hour of pen grip practice :) And of course making our drive in Miss A's words "beautiful for passers by"
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