What's New With Ella?

Ella is doing very well.  Behaviorally we have seen improvements across the board and in all settings. Ella was even chosen as All Star Student for December - an honor bestowed for good behavior and effort, not academics - and her excitement over having a pizza lunch with the principal could not have been greater.  Attachment is going well and Ella now more verbally expresses her positive emotions for us as her family.  Here's what she told me recently about her plans for the future:

“When we grow up, Emilia and I will live together.  We will make campfires and I’ll tell her to be careful.  We will live next door to you and daddy and Rex.  You will have an outdoor pool and we will have an indoor pool, so we can swim all the time.  Emilia and I will work on the computer.  We will come to visit you and sometimes take Rex to something fun.  We will bring him a sandwich and chips.  When you die, Rex will live with us.  We will take care of him.  We will do everything he asks and buy him an i-pad.”

In early November Craig and I began to realize that the pressure and strain of academic demands were taking a toll on Ella’s continued attachment, happiness, language development and social-emotional progress.  We were in agreement that these areas of growth, for the time being, are more important to us and to Ella than her academic work, so we decided to take the scholastic stress off at home.  We also agreed that if this decision would lead to her needing to repeat first grade, it would be an acceptable outcome to us.  In conjunction with recommendations from Ella’s teacher, we cut homework to about 30 minutes a day, including weekends, covering spelling, math, reading and special projects.  

I think it is easy for adoptive parents and educators to overlook the tremendous effort children (along with their brains) have to make to learn a new language and how that process complicates their academic achievement.  If you talk to Ella conversationally at this point, you will hardly think that just over a year ago, she didn’t know any English.  She gabs away happily, she uses idioms, tells jokes, etc. However, when placed into the classroom where she has to cope with increasingly complicated scholastic terminology that refers to complex tasks (alphabetize, sequential order, Venn diagram, etc.), with spelling, with reading comprehension and so on, she is at a disadvantage in comparison to her peers who have lived their entire lives in our English-speaking country. Ella has to double up her efforts to keep her head above the water academically.  It’s not that she is not cognitively capable of doing the work.  She absolutely is.  But tasks take her longer to complete, she has to ask more questions for clarification, decreasing her independence and feeling of success.  I can always tell when worksheets come home for which instructions were clear to Ella and when the opposite was the case.  Based on extensive research with English Language Learners, we know it will take Ella at least seven years until we can expect her to reach grade level norms in English language literacy.  Hopefully she will be on par with her peers by the time she starts high school, especially since her wonderful ESOL teacher told us that she's a sponge for her new language.

The time that Ella gained back between coming home from school around 4:15 and going to bed at 8:00 is now spent hanging out with her neighborhood friends, relaxing, doing crafts, reading for fun, playing with her sister, completing puzzles, helping me cook, etc.  We have cut her tech time to 30 minutes a day which she usually spends watching Wild Kratts.  Surprisingly, as we have taken off the academic pressure at home, we have seen significant improvements in Ella's reading skills (up several levels in just the last two months), penmanship and cooperation in practicing it, spelling and willingness to tackle new academic challenges.  Maybe sometimes less is more indeed.