Well, what an interesting week! Life with a dyspraxia kid is never dull is it?

Our highlight and lowlight came on the same day…

The Highlight

The highlight was that DK’s French teacher sent a message saying that DK had worked really hard and done well in French this week. This has never happened with any of her lessons away from her class teacher. So of course I leapt on this little nugget of positivity 🙂

I was in Poundland the next day (yes, my life is usually this glamourous), shopping for yet more hair bobbles (where do they all go?), and spied some educational workbooks. They had a really good selection, and I was really surprised to find an excellent French book for age 7+ on the shelves. Perfect! Only a pound (I guess you’d worked that out already).

It’s perfect for a little dyspraxic as there are regular sticker rewards and a certificate at the end. It’s bright, very visual, and most of all fun! There are a number of games, tasks where you just circle the answer or join the French to the English with a pencil line, and some speaking tasks too. There’s no way a child with DCD is going to put up with a book that’s mostly writing.

I strongly suggest you take a look in Poundland before the summer holidays and stock up on some of these workbooks–they had them on lots of different subjects and for different age groups. Summer learning loss is even more of an issue for our little guys so it’s good to keep their little brains fed. It also makes the back-to-school transition that bit easier, if you’ve been keeping up some kind of educational work with them.

The Lowlight

Ah, the lowlight of the week…

I wonder if it was a good idea to make the kids do PE outside on one of the hottest days of the year and not expect any consequences?

There was a hot-tempered exchange between my daughter and her best friend, and DK reacted by squeezing her bestie’s arm in frustration. Not the correct reaction, and of course we (and a patient teaching assistant) explained this, BUT…

When I heard her side of things… Her best friend was actually being really mean about DK’s physical capabilities, told her she wasn’t very good at jumping, and that she wasn’t getting any points. If it was boiling hot, I was being made to do a task I hate and that I’m trying my best at, and my best friend is standing there telling me I’m crap then I think I would have reacted too!

A Happy Ending

Her bestie obviously realises that my daughter has issues and often helps her, but I’ve taken this incident as a sign that I need to produce some kind of sheet that explains to her friends just why she finds certain things difficult. In other words, I’m going design something that can explain dyspraxia simply to kids.

I plan on making this a free download, so stay tuned! So at least there’s some positivity out of this hot-tempered negative event.

Of course they are back to being best friends already 🙂

I hope you’ve all had good weeks, and, as always, please let me know if there are any other resources or articles that you’d like to see added to Dyspraxia Kids.