Yesterday thousands of children from all over Spain started school. Some returned because they were gone last year and others were released, because they start preschool. Many of them came running, happy and happy to see their friends again and many others came in close to mom or dad, not wanting to let go and crying to see that they had to separate.
As we have said on other occasions, major changes are difficult for anyone to manage. Children, who are also people and who have fewer tools to adapt to them, suffer the consequences of such changes even more. For this reason, nurseries and schools make the so-called "adaptation period", which is sometimes not progressive enough since, despite a little lightening the shock that would involve going from being home 24 hours to spend 8 or 10 hours out, for a short time, being without mom is a lot of change.
Ideally, mom (or the person who takes the child to school) could stay for a little while (or a lot of time) for the first few days, so that the process was gradual and the adaptation was not forced, but work schedules are difficult to match an adaptation of several days and, although they were, there are few centers that accept that mom or dad enter with the child because they believe that "it is even worse".
Taking this as a basis, we will try to explain how to help children make school adaptation the best possible, with the help of the symbolic game.
The symbolic game
The symbolic game is defined as that game that a child performs with the intention of representing something that he would do at another time or that other people do. It would be, for example, to play for tea, lie on the floor to play sleeping or make the dolls talk to each other.
It differs from the exercise game, which would be the one that a child performs when he plays with fittings or when he hits a wood with a hammer, in that in the symbolic game a mental representation is created based on the experience lived or observed in which the child repeats situations for pure fun (although as a means to learn to live, since it is like "play to live").
Well, just as the symbolic game serves children to repeat playing the things they observe or do, we, as parents, can use it to represent what they have not yet seen or lived, creating situations similar to those that will live so that, on the day that reality comes, create associations with the game already lived.
Last year, when my son Jon was about to enter school we worked a lot with this technique and, really, I think it was a success (it is true that we can not compare with anything, because we do not know what the reaction would have been of our son of not having played with him previously, but it is also true that we were playing several days to it, even when he had already started school, by his decision).
How to do it
It can be done in several ways. One of them would be posing as children or teachers, "playing to be" and making our son a student, but see us dressed in teachers, speaking to them differently and treating them differently ("what does mom say she is the lady?") can create a bit of confusion.
Another way, which was the one we used and that worked great, because you can have many characters, is to use dolls and give each of them a role to interact.
In our case, we had a magazine of "Les Tres Bessones" (The Three Twins) that we had at home and that was great because it had a double-sided drawing of a class.
We put the magazine on the wall, which served as a background and used the characters for action. Leo it was Jon, Peter Pan It was dad, Mom was Bell Y Heidi It was Sara, the teacher.
The plot thread
Once the characters are defined, we begin to play with them. Peter Pan, Bell Y Leo they came to school together and accompanied the child to a row of children (composed of Ratatoille, Quincy, Messi, June, Lilo, ...) where they said goodbye to him:
-Well honey, I leave you the backpack with breakfast and the napkin, which is inside. A kiss. Now I go home to make food and you stay for a while playing with the children and with Sara, okay? In a little while I'll come looking for you - said mom. -A little kiss. I go to work. Have a great time and play a lot. Then mom comes to look for you and in the afternoon I will come too - Dad said.
Then we took Leo (Jon) and we said "Goodbye dad, goodbye mom. Then see you" and dad and mom disappeared from the scene. At that moment Sara went into action: -Good morning, children! Let's go inside the class! Come on, we take off our backpacks and hang them up! Take off the gowns and we will wear them!
And so we were emulating what we thought could happen in class any day. Jon hallucinated looking at our representation. We were going to look for him to go home to eat, play for a while at home and then go back to school. Finally, after spending the afternoon, we picked him up at school and we all went home together.
The result
The result was that Jon went to school knowing in some way some of the things that were going to happen and maybe that was the reason why he didn't cry more than a little at the start of the first day and that he came in every day saying "Goodbye Dad, goodbye mom, "while many other children tried to lengthen the separation even if it was only a few seconds.
He liked the game so much and it should have been so productive that he asked us to play it when he came back in the afternoon. In this way he taught us what had happened that day and thus we learned (indirectly) of what neither he nor anyone had told us through direct dialogue.
