transition

Imagine this: you are 13 years old, just about to finish middle school getting ready to start high school with all your friends, when one day you came home from school and the bombshell hits. Your mum sits you down and tells you the news that nobody wants to hear at that point in life, you find it hard to remember the whole talk. all you seem to remember are the words,” WE ARE MOVING.” when you finally get to terms with it, you ask where to, with the hope it won’t be too far so it won’t be a complete new start. The second news is that we would be moving to Wellington, you can just imagine how devastated I was with getting this news. I know that many of you will have undergone this experience and some may have moved several times. But my own experiences as well as research show that moves of this kind can have a mixture of effects, especially on people our age. Today I am going to talk about the different things you might go through and the different ways people can help you when going through a big move like this.

When you first start at new school, the research told me that you feel lost and confused before you orientate yourself to the new change between middle school and high school. But what helped to make the changes were my family and the different types of support they gave me. They did this by asking me how my day was by asking me about all the things I got up to in my different classes and with all my friends. The many types of questions that they would ask me are how was your day? Did you make any friends? What are they like? How were your classes? And what did you learn? These questions helped me when starting at a new school because it helped me open up about how I was feeling about the new school and how I was coping. With my family asking me questions, it made me feel better because I knew that they were making sure I had settled in properly and so that if there were any troubles I was having, they could get it sorted and get things back to a good place where I was happy. I believe that if my family did not do this stuff for me when changing schools, it would not been that easy for me and I would have just find it harder to settle in. Which is why I believe having your family’s support is one of the things you can do to make changing schools much easier Another bit of research I found said, that when starting at a new school, we may start to grief about out old school and friends and that we may feel, lonely, unhappy and worried that we may not be a part of a group. But another group of people in your life that can help you are your friends; they can remind you that you are still a part of a group. There is a bunch of things that my friends did for me when I moved schools. When starting mainly, if you start half way through the year, your new friends or classmates can show you around the school and where your different classes are, this can help because it can help take some of your stress away, and is a good way to find new friends and who the nicer people in the school are. Your old friends can help by texting you and keeping in touch and by doing the same hobbies that you all used to do together. For me those hobbies were film making, because me and my friends like making short films together. Another thing your new friends can do is include you in there hobbies, because you may find the new hobbies that you really like doing, and that you may never get tired of doing without them.
Something that is just as important is keeping you happy but I found through research, that when we first started at a school, we are fearful about being bullied. That we won’t fit in with a group and that we won’t live up to our parents expectations. these types of thoughts make us fear the worst about what may happen, but with the right support from others you can be in a good head space, you can do this by doing little things that u enjoy and to just take time to reflect on how you are going before and after the move to a different school. some of the things that you can do is to keep on talking to the people who are already in your life like your family and friends and getting support from them and just doing little with people who are going though the move with you. Like your family or family friends or just people you already know from the neighbourhood. These things can be something as simple as going to the movies or just talking about the things going on in each other’s lives and what you both are going through with the change to a different school.
You behaviour during the change of schools can be different from how you normally are, because you may be under stress or just worried and nervous about school, but the research I did on this told me, that when young people change schools, they may show stress and change in their behaviour in the following ways, being short tempered, being disagreeable or not wanting to talk to you, sometimes wanting to be treated as an adult, other times wanting to be treated as a child again and changing behaviour in order to impress e.g. silliness or rebelling against parents or just not wanting to go to school. I definitely did some of these stuffs but through all the help and support I got from the different people in my life. I got through the changes easier with the help of the people around me.
In conclusion I feel that with the right support, you can get through and make the most out of the worst situation.