Challenges Faced By Children During Primary School Transition: An Essay With Tips For Parents.

The Importance of Transition Period

Question:

Discuss about the Early Childhood Education Case Study Related To Daisy.

Primary schooling can be frightening for young children, who had previously enjoyed their time in kindergarten (Birger 2008). A child’s transition is the most import ant phase of a child’s primary education. The scope of this current analysis is of Mary, parent of a child who attaches importance to academic preparation for a child’s transition into primary one. She has sent her child Daisy enrichment programs. Daisy appeared to cope well during her initial weeks in primary one. However, after some time, she has begun to throw temper tantrums, which has alarmed everyone. She often cries at the school gate, refusing to enter the school premise despite her teacher’s efforts to convince her. Getting ready for school in the morning has become a great challenge for both the mother and daughter (Harcourt 2011). Year after year young children progresses to primary one, advancing from kindergarten to primary school. It is a normal advancement of schooling systems but can be daunting for many children. Some children does not appear to be ready for primary schooling as it involves immense transition. The scope of this analysis deals with Daisy’s transition and Mary’s preparation for making her child go into primary one (Yeung 2011). Some recommendation is provided at the end that can help ease transition of Daisy into primary one.

Daisy’s transition from kindergarten into primary one has emerged to be daunting. Parents, especially mother Mary has to cope up with multiple changes to assure the child did not feel anxious regarding the transition phase. Mary while sending Daisy to primary one schooling has to prepare for expecting many changes as possible. While the changes can be enormous, it is often daunting as a child of seven years of age has to handle it. Mary views the transition from kindergarten to primary one change as being mostly academic in nature. She believes that unlike kindergarten where there was very little amount of studies involved, primary school includes a lot of things to be done (Wortham 2015). She is mostly ignorant about the multiple other changes that come accompanied along with academic challenges.

While academic pressure can be coped up with in presence of proper guidance, a child is expected to make transition into a whole new environment. At first Daisy was able to bear some of pressure from unexpected changes, however as days passed she experienced more pressure at home. Mary was not able to assimilate the fact that Daisy was adjusting to a whole new environment, hence she should not be subjected to additional academic pressures at home. On the other hand, she felt that being able to deal with academic pressure was the only way out of the  situation in which Daisy was in (Chien 2010). Several literatures on the subject indicate that parents especially mothers needs to be more empathic and sometimes also sympathetic towards the several challenges the child is facing. She should not ignore them or create additional pressures.

Daisy's Experience with Primary One

Transiting from kindergarten to primary school involves less amounts of play time and more amount of academics. But that it a singular perspective on the transition of a child. Mary needs to look at overall process of transition that would let Daisy to cope with academic pressures and other changes more readily. Rather than preparing Daisy for a fun based learning experience, Mary had done everything to scare the child even more. The child was in a state of dilemma to deal with the current situation and wanted to avoid it altogether. Ebbeck and Chan (2011) in their perspective on transition phase to primary one in early childhood education provided a wholesome view of the entire approach (Ebbeck 2011). Their article has covered a lot of new concepts along with prominent situations that are faced by parents of transiting children in Singapore. Singapore is a society where children from various communities are present, hence parents from different society experiences varied types of fear related to primary school. Admission in primary school is often based on merit of children and their parents. Though it is not stringent but certain tests are taken prior to admission, also there starts marking criteria of children from primary one level (Anning 2008). Children from Chinese community, which comprise of a large number of Singapore population are often competitive in nature where children from other community feels outcast. Parent’s perspective like Mary is to prepare children to be competitive and make their children excel in academic performance. Major concentration of parents in Singapore is to make their children achieve higher grades or be top performers in their class (Essa 2012).

Poon, Musti-Ra and Wettasinghe (2013) in their article attaches importance to multiple subjects that are introduced to children at primary one level (Poon 2013). Till kindergarten children are introduced to concepts in vocabulary, English, math, but at primary one level there are subjects which children needs to learn. Parents are often themselves unarmed as to discover ways to teach the young child to learn so many subjects at such time span. This creates an overall pressure for children and their parents, while they transit to primary one (McLachlan 2012).

The process of successful transition from kindergarten to primary school has shown to have positive effects on a child’s academic performance as well as social competence. Transition from pre to primary school level is a critical period for children and has been acknowledged to be traumatic or troubled or effective or enjoyable depending on ways children adapt to new learning environment by coping with demands posed by teachers and parents (Wortham 2009). At pre-school different priorities  had been given to socio-emotional and academic developments for providing a formal setting for children entering primary school. Chinese population consisting of majority in Singapore emphasizes on academic performances whereas Westernized countries focuses more on social maturity as highlighted by Zhang and Siegel (1994) (Mirkhil 2010). The primary focus in Singapore based preschool centers is to prepare children for meeting academic demands at primary level completely ignoring social and emotional maturity. The National Institute of Education in Singapore in 1997 initiated a program to enable children to cope with academic, emotional and social demands of primary level towards a more competitive and formal learning environment. Studies conducted in this domain reflects that mothers needs to provide hands-on preparation to their children to be able to cope with the several changes expected at school. She needs aid the child in dealing with emotional tantrums or any other possible environmental changes that the child is expected to face (Gordon 2013).   

Parent's Role in Preparing for Transition

Daisy while transiting from pre-school to primary one is expected to cope with several academic as well as social-emotional changes. First and most integral social change that Daisy is expected to make is adjustment to a new environment (Lian 2008). A child will be going to a completely new environment in a new school where there will be new classmates and teachers. Moreover, in this new environment children are expected to be trained for certain basic behavioral trends as toilet training, disciplinary training or any other similar training pertaining to specific school. Allen and Cowdery (2014) provided integral inputs regarding social transition which forms a pre-requisite in early childhood school setting (Allen 2014). In the literature importance of developing social skills amongst children were explained in great details and depth. Hartup (1992) explained the importance of children developing minimum social competence at the age of 6 otherwise they might be at risk through their entire life. Social competence includes curiosity, warmth, humor, confidence, reliability, spontaneity, sense of being right, morally responsible behaviour, discipline, friendliness, cooperation, problem-solving capabilities, helpfulness and adaptability as incorporated by Black and Puckett (1996) (Chan 2012). From these several areas related to social and emotional competence Daisy is most likely to face issue related to warmth, self-confidence, reliability and adaptability.

Daisy had been well adjusted in her kindergarten school level and has comfort of her mother at home. While being exposed to a whole new environment, it can be least expected that she gets the same warmth that she previously got in her pre-school or one that she gets at home. Pre-school children are treated in a different manner, where they are looked after and taken care off. they are hand-held for doing each and every task, relationship of a teacher with that of a pre-school child is mother-child relationship. At primary one level there is bound to be more number of children as against pre-school and teacher will be more formal and sometimes even stick. A child like Daisy must have expected the same warmth in her initial days at school and when she missed it, she refused to go to the school.             

McClellan and Katz (1993) noted that most important part of early development in children is to interact and get along with other children, this helps them develop their self-confidence levels. Self-confidence is the most integral part of adult adaptation as children who are unable to mix with peer grow up to be socially handicapped, and are later unable to form close relationship. These children can suffer from poor mental health with impeded learning                                 at school or later in their lives. Daisy is expected to face challenge in regards to self-confidence and adaptability which has hindered her from making friends. It is prominent from her behaviour as she refuses to go to school that she has not been able to make close association or adopt to situation in the primary school. She is facing socio-emotional challenge that has hindered her from making associates. Katz and McClellan (1991) emphasized the need of “3R’s” along with education in lives of every children. It is during primary learning years that children often makes friends for lifetime. It is an integral phase in life of children that they make friends, develop relationship of trust and closeness. It is one of the first relationship that humans make in the society after their birth and association with parents. It is significant part of growing up and impacts development of a child’s mental health. Parents and teacher needs to support and emphasize children into making good friends by sharing and other simple endeavors. This will help the child develop reliability on one another. Prerequisite for building and establishing effective social relationship with others is developed with abilities to emphasize and understand perspective of others. There has been several research in the past years that considers role-taking abilities amongst children to be quite sophisticated in nature. Thus, various stages of socio-emotional developments were thought to be integral for children’s development that were lagging for Daisy.     

Emotional and Social Implications of Primary School

Children during transition face immense amounts of challenges that might affect them in their future life span. These issues and challenges has been broadly classified as being academic and social or emotional in nature. Parents especially mothers, teachers and school can play enormous role in changing the entire perspective of the child in early years transiting to primary one. The criticalness of this stage poses threats in itself that amplifies the need for carefulness while dealing with children (Ebbeck 2009). While teachers and school does play a prominent role, mothers have a larger role to play to ensure that the child is able to cope with the challenges of day to day pressures at primary one. In the current case highlighted of Daisy, she is expected to face mostly socio-emotional challenges as her mother is quite careful regarding her academic performance. Her numerous socio-emotional challenges includes lack of warmth, self-confidence, reliability and adaptability.      

First of all Mary could have attended orientation class with the child. This would have helped foster a spirit of self-confidence in Daisy, who was not able to adjust with latest school environment. Daisy’s self-confidence could be boosted also by making use of counseling, where Mary would assure her that like all children she can easily attend school. Mary could also focus on all positive achievements of Daisy along her past kindergarten experience. She could explain her that Daisy had gone to kindergarten when she was 2 and half years of age and adjusted to the environment, so this would be an easy task for her. For some time Mary should stop focusing on academics part of Daisy and provide more help in socio-emotional part.     

Sharing Mary’s positive primary level school experience could help Daisy feel more confident regarding her new school. It would provide her a feeling of assurance that her mother had gone through similar procedure, allowing her to adapt more to the environment. Sharing positive experience of Mary’s primary schooling would help Daisy develop a positive attachment with the environment (Zhang 2011). Emotional counseling is critical for child who are experiencing a transition phase and are unable to deal with the pressures from it. emotional counseling will provide Daisy with the warmth she is missing at school. Mary can one day take along Daisy to talk to her teacher, where she can discuss regarding the challenges she is facing. Mary can also ask personally any problems daisy is facing at her school, which she can tell the teacher. Attending to specific problems will help Daisy overcome her challenges more easily. Mary can mix with children after school gets over and talk to their parents, or may be call them at her home for a platy date. This will help Daisy to easily make friends within comfort of her home and hence develop reliability. Gan (1999) concluded in study conducted in Singapore that parents can play a large role in assisting their children to develop better socio-emotional relationship during childhood.  These strategies will help Daisy overcome her current fears and step into a whole new environment which will prepare her for later in life.    

Tips for Parents to Help their Children Cope with Transition

Conclusion

Analysing pertinent literatures in early childhood education it can be said that developing socio-emotional relationship is critical as academic performance. In the current case while Daisy faces a number of socio-emotional challenges, her mother remained ignorant. Her mother needs to develop strategies to help Daisy out of the situation and overcome pertinent challenges in regards to the same. This will enable Daisy to have a much successful transition into primary one.

References

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