Welcome to 5energies!

Oh my goodness, here we go… The first-ever 5energies© blog. So, take a deep breath, slow down, and pick the most important thing to talk about.

Let’s start with children.

In Australia today, there are many children struggling to learn. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2007, there were 1, 969, 303 primary aged children within Australia. At a rough estimate, within each school, there are likely to be a minimum of 15% of children who are struggling to learn. These children may have learning delays in visual or auditory discrimination or processing, for example, or have delayed receptive or expressive language skills. Perhaps their fine motor skills are preventing them from the full range of manipulative skills required for concrete learning in the early stages of schooling.

For whatever reason, that 15% of children with learning challenges translates to an astonishing 295, 395 primary school children across this country who may – or may not – achieve functional literacy and numeracy skills as they struggle to make sense of daily school routines, tasks and ways of operating that their peers take for granted. These children usually have normal cognitive function, so it is not that they don’t WANT to learn – they often have delays in one or more of the ten key domains that underpin learning and learning just does not come together easily for these children.

This is why we love helping these children. We welcome the opportunity to introduce them to the best team in the country, a team that consists of an experienced speech pathologist, occupational therapist, educational psychologist and senior educators. Our mission is to screen them across ten key domains, and find out exactly why they are not learning. We so enjoy seeing the looks of satisfaction on children’s faces when they succeed and develop strategies to help them make sense of their world. We relish the chance to share information with parents in workshops where we explain the activities and model them for parents to use at home. Our vision is to share our approach further, extending the number of schools who have already attended the three-day professional development, and are now working in an integrated 5energies© way.

So welcome to 5energies©. While there is lots of information on the website itself, this blog will be where we can discuss issues of importance as we value the children in our midst, and value the opportunities to create new beginnings, new partnerships and new synergies, as we help our children to learn.