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Your child can count to ten and write their own name. Does that mean they are ready for school? Yvette Abraham, Founder and Director of Skylas, says readiness has far more to do with emotional regulation, language and confidence than it does with letters and numbers. She joins Eddie Reaiche and Natalie Moujalli to unpack the zones of regulation, what to do when your child gets in the car seeing red, and how to recognise a difficulty early without putting a label on your child.
Key Takeaways:
- School Readiness Is More Than Letters And Numbers: The skills that decide whether your child copes in a classroom are communication, emotional regulation and confidence, and those are far harder to teach in the last term before school than counting to ten.
- Teach The Word Before The Feeling: Children learn self regulation faster when you start with something concrete they can picture, like slowing a car in a school zone, rather than asking them to name an emotion they have no vocabulary for yet.
- Anxiety Is Already Present In The Early Years: Yvette sees it regularly and links it to busy lifestyles, technology and the pressure of being accepted by peers, often before a child has the words to explain any of it.
- The Meltdown At Home Is A Compliment: A child who holds it together all day at school and falls apart the moment they walk in the door is telling you that home is the safe place, not that you have done something wrong.
- A Child Does Not Need A Diagnosis To Get Support: A letter from a professional describing which strategies work for your child can do the same job at school as a label, without the label.
- The Child Hardest To Praise Needs It Most: A child with challenging behaviour can hear their own name in a negative sentence dozens of times a day, and turning that around costs a teacher roughly fifteen minutes across an entire day.
Notable Quotes:
- "What it means is adjusting the settings to suit the environment." — Natalie Moujalli
- "You're looking at prevention rather than intervention." — Natalie Moujalli
- "She'll question me. Are you in the yellow zone or are you in the red zone? Come, I'll give you a big hug to calm me down." — Yvette Abraham
- "The child is a whole person, not a condition." — Eddie Reaiche
- "Let's say Jimmy has some cheeky behaviours. You're going to hear his name called out in the classroom a hundred times throughout the day. And it's all for doing negative things." — Yvette Abraham
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