For the sake of those involved I don’t want to tell you any names, but it is such a lovely story that I wanted to tell you all. There is a little boy who suffers from a condition called ‘selective mutism’. It happens where some event has traumatised a child and they simply stop talking. In this case the little boy would not talk to adults. He was very unhappy at school until he was in the class of the teacher that this story is about and who is the best teacher any child could hope to have. This teacher noticed that the child, would talk to his friend and as the teacher needed the child to read, instead of making him read to the teacher he let the boys go into a different room so that he could read to his friend. Then as the teacher needed to listen to his reading, he brought walkie talkies into school and gave one to the boys to take to the other room and kept one on his desk. By having the walkie talkies turned on the teacher was able to listen to the little boy read. The next step was to progress to talking to the little boy through the walkie talkie when he was in the other room. Then the boys wanted to borrow the walkie talkies and knowing what they wanted, the teacher said they needed to ask to borrow them and suggested that if both boys spoke at the same time to ask then that would be a good way of doing it. This gave a safe environment for the little boy to speak directly to his teacher for the very first time. I’ve heard of schemes where my fellow dogs go into schools to enable children who lack confidence to read to the dog and I am really proud of the work they do too, but if the teacher concerned is reading this, I’d just like them to know that we couldn’t be more proud of them and the wonderful job they are doing.
Alfie Dog with a little help from Rosemary J Kind alfie@alfiedog.me.uk
Alfie’s Diary – the Book is available at Amazon UK –https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00583ZGSA
You can find short stories to read at www.alfiedog.com