SALLY IN SCHOOL

Sally is 7 years of age and is in Grade 1 in a mainstream school. Sally lives with her foster carers and their dog Bruce. Accompanied by her foster carer, Marie, Sally enjoys walking Bruce to school, which is a few streets away. The children in Sally’s class know Bruce and come to greet Bruce and Sally when they arrive at school. Sally always used to get upset when Marie left to walk Bruce home, but became used to it once she learned that Marie would return in the afternoon with Bruce to walk home again. Still, occasionally she will get agitated and chases after Marie when she tries to leave the school with Bruce.

Sally is learning the letters and sounds of the alphabet. Sometimes Sally can recognise letters on a page or in a story book and recall their sounds and other times she cannot recognise the letters.

Sally sometimes likes to draw with crayons, and can draw rudimentary stick figures and basic drawings of houses, trees and flowers.

Sally finds holding a pencil and writing difficult. She likes the feel and colours of play doh^TM but finds manipulating the play doh into letter shapes very tricky. Sally can often complete a task when given extra time and one-to-one support. Sally is able to concentrate best in the mornings.

Sally enjoys show and tell. She likes to tell stories about her dog Bruce. Sally’s stories are very inventive and combine elements of real life events with details that Sally believes she recalls. Sometimes Sally’s stories are hard to follow as they are told with a lot of excitement, contain a lot of detail and don’t always follow a clear narrative.

Sally also likes listening to her classmate’s stories and often contributes her own views, something her classmates don’t always appreciate. Sally often gets off the story mat to walk around the classroom.

Sally has three friends with whom she likes to play pretend doggy games at lunch time. Sally enjoys these games when the rules are simple but finds it tricky when her friends introduce rules that she finds difficult to remember.

When Sally gets excited during play she gets very close to her friends and sometimes hugs them tightly. Sometimes her friends do not like this and exclude Sally from their play.

When Sally feels upset, angry or frustrated she runs away and hides. A number of times she has run out of the school yard.