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Back to School and Adoption Resources

Back to school season can be complicated! It's even trickier when adoption, foster care, guardianship, or other forms of permanency are in the mix. These free resources for parents and educators will set you up for a successful school year. 

School and Adoption: Navigating the Education system is a 28-page digital resource guide covering everything from trauma, racism, and IEPs to a letter you can copy and send to your child’s teacher.

Racism and your child

Source: 
Focus on Adoption magazine

When kids experience racism, what can their parents do? Here are some resources and tips from an experienced adoptive parent.

Editor’s note: Some of these tips are aimed specifically at white parents. AFABC recognizes that adoptive families are incredibly diverse, and that transracial adoptive families include parents from all backgrounds, heritages, and experiences, including parents of colour who have firsthand experience with racism.

Adopted Voice series

Focus on Adoption and AFABC have always sought to centre adoptee voices and perspectives, but the #FlipTheScript campaign (launched during Adoption Awareness Month in 2014) inspired us to launch a regular column called "Adopted Voice." The series ran from 2015 to 2016.

Diary of an Adoptive Mom series

Source: 
Focus on Adoption magazine

Here are some of the articles from our long-running Diary of an Adoptive Mom series. This adoptive mother shares her experiences and secret thoughts of raising three children. This series ran from 2006 to 2010.

Note: Diary entries #1 to #7 are unavailable 

My life with FASD

Source: 
Focus on Adoption magazine

People with FASD struggle with lifelong behaviour and learning problems. In this article, one young adoptee shares her story of life with FASD. All names have been changed.

10 tips for IEP season

Source: 
Focus on Adoption magazine

As if the back to school routine isn’t busy enough for families, there is also the added stress for parents of children with special needs to participate in Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings for each of their children. Here are 10 tips to help you go in with a positive attitude, a collaborative mindset, and a plan of action.

4 steps to effective advocacy

Advocating for your child’s needs at school is a key part of an adoptive parent’s “job description.” In this article, teacher and parent Alison Wagler shares her tips on how to work with the school as an ally, not an adversary.

One memorable Halloween at the school where I teach, a parent kindly offered to bring in a smoke machine to make the Halloween party more exciting. The party became exciting indeed when the smoke set off the fire alarm, sending 400 kids in costumes out into the rain for an unplanned fire drill.

Childhood trauma in the classroom 10 things teachers need to know

Source: 
Focus on Adoption magazine

For children who have experienced trauma, learning can be a big struggle. Here’s how to help them.

With grief, sadness is obvious. With trauma, the symptoms can go largely unrecognized because it shows up looking like other problems: frustration, acting out, or difficulty concentrating, following directions or working in a group. Often students are misdiagnosed with anxiety, behavior disorders or attention disorders, rather than understanding the trauma that’s driving those symptoms and reactions.

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