Oh I hear that! I just wanted to give a different viewpoint for people who needed to hear it, who have kids that need to go to university for many reasons but are not totally ready to do it independently. My younger also needed lots of support in his first year in university. He has dysgraphia and he was not actually ready to go to university from the point of writing, but for our family dynamic (and other reasons), I could not teach him anymore at home. So in that first year I acted as an intensive writing coach and tutor. We could have hired one, but it was free to use me and more efficient as I had been working with him on writing for 3 hours a day for 6 years so knew how to help. All I'm saying is that there is a discourse that says that kids must be independent at 18, and not all cultures or families do it that way.

No they were not all a clique, --some of them really hated others, and some worshiped the top IMO kids, and some just needed a group so they didn't have to meet new people at uni. To get to the MOP level, you have to be very competitive. So there was a lot of jockeying to figure out your position in the pecking order when they got to MIT and met new kids. Some were like we are the USA MOP group so we are the best. The MOP kids had a certain vibe, and although my ds did all the competitions and had met some of them at the IMO, he in general tried to steer clear of them. Lots of non-MOP kids were collaborative rather than competitive so he hung out with them, and some of the MOP kids were trying to break away from the clique (and one of these will be in his wedding in July). Very strange stuff from my ds's point of view who had spent a quiet life in NZ working from home at his own speed.

I wanted to add that it is OK for kids to not be completely independent when they go off to college. My ds went from homeschooling in NZ with mom-made curriculum (and no DE) to attending MIT in the USA. There was no way I could prepare him for that - not the educational rigor or the cultural differences (both schooling type and country). So almost every night he would call to ask questions about how to organize assignments and make a study plan, but more importantly to get a listening ear while he tried to sort out the emotional rollercoaster that was this adjustment phase. He had no experience dealing with kids like the ones he was going to school with, and he didn't understand the cliques and rivalries (especially the 30 MOP kids -- the kids who went to the US top math Olympiad camp together the prior year). It took about 3 months to find his feet, and we were with him during that process. Just saying, that not all things can be prepared for. His transition was smooth, but only because we continued to be heavily involved in the first semester.

I use 2 reused tea bags for the second cup. And steep them the same amount of time as the first cup.

Yup. My ds got his in 8 days, and we didn't pay for expediting.

My dh's older sister is 14 years older than him and his brother is 13 years older than him. Growing up, he had his little 5-year-old friends, ask why he had "2 mommies and 2 daddies". By about the age of 25, he became much closer with both his brother and sister in more of a sibling sort of way. And now at 50, he is very close to his brother in particular, and to his nieces and nephew who are actually closer to him in age.

Ever since covid, I have a strict don't-come-if-you-are-sick policy. And guess what, I quit getting sick all the time. If a kid is sick, I make up the lessons online at the same time slot (either with them at school or at home but both online away from me). If they show up sick, or with 'allergies', I make a stink about it, and then we both wear masks and I open all the windows and we put jackets on. They don't usually do it a second time. I make space for 1 very sick, cancels-all-the-time student each year (migraines, leukemia, etc), but I only can do this for 1 student because it is just too hard to have constant moving around kids. I know you are in music, so clearly not as easy as for me in math, but my older boy does online music lessons, so I know it can work, just not as good. The goal is to say you canNOT come sick (no exceptions), but then to make the make-up option not great, so they only use it if they are actually sick. If a kid is *really* sick, I will organize with the kid directly to make-up when they are better. In contrast, I have flexible policy for school trips/sports/work/medical appointments. If you give me 3 days notice, I will switch you into an open slot. The kids work directly with me by text to do this. Some kids move a lot, others never. But if they all give me 3 days notice, then I know about open slots.

In my field in NZ, it is very hard to get funding for a PhD without a masters to prove you can do research. I have no idea what a terminal vs non-terminal masters is and don't think its a thing in NZ.

I have more to say about the years from 16-20, but will have to do it another time. Basically, I continued to work intensively (3 hours per day side by side on the sofa) for his last 2 years of high school. Then in the first year of university, I tutoring him by phone for about 20 hours per paper he had to write. In the second year, it was about 10 hours per paper. Now in the third year, I am more like a typical university writing tutor, and work with him about 2 hours per week. We are almost there! He still loves writing. He keeps a list of new fancy words he is learning, and continues to improve his spelling by fixing errors without the spell check. His style is beautiful, and he is getting faster (although still not fast). He cannot, however, physically write with any ease as he cannot remember how to form the letters. Last year, he worked as a writer for the Sustainability Trust blog. So putting to practice all he learned and fought for. The math has been completely remediated, and he earned an A+ in both statistics and chemistry at university, even though the average was a B- (there is no grade inflation here). This has been a lot, but I hope it is helpful. I'm happy to answer questions. Ruth in NZ

Here is what I've written up about how dysgraphia was integrated with his math. This question was about 'showing your work' in math, but it still has some fascinating stuff in it about how disgraphia hit so many aspects of my ds's academic life On 4/18/2019 at 4:01 AM, Runningmom80 said: She is the type of kid who will read a 3 step word problem and tell us the correct answer but when we ask her to show her work, she rolls around on the floor like we asked her to write a PhD thesis. MY RESPONSE Hope it is ok that I quoted this tiny piece of the OP. I have not read all the responses, but wanted to respond to this one in particular. I am a math tutor, and my ds15 has dysgraphia; and writing out proper workings is a hill I am willing to die on. It has been a long three year process to get to where we are now, which is about half of the progress we need by graduation. Slow and stead wins the race, and I put on my big-girl panties every day and get the job done. I wrote this up back in October, and thought I couldn't probably say it as well again, so I've just copied it. Hope that is OK. An event 3 years ago really impacted how I perceive of showing your mathematical workings. My younger son was struggling to write, so we took him in to get tested for dysgraphia. They worked him through a battery of tests that took 2 days and about 5 hours. I was in the room because he wanted me to be. He was 11 at the time. For the math section, the final question was something like you have 5 oranges and 8 apples costing $20, and 8 bananas and 6 oranges cost $18, and 9 applies and 3 bananas cost $21. How much does each fruit cost? (this is not the question, just something like it). I got out a piece of paper and simply coded it as three equations and three unknowns, but then realized I was going to get fractional answers. Yuck! Well, my ds had not started algebra certainly had never done simultaneous equations, had never seen a problem remotely like this, plus he could not write. Although he was allowed to use paper, he did not touch it. It took him 15 minutes to get the answer. He did it in his head. To say that the examiner and I were flabbergasted, would be to undersell our response. Neither of us could figure out how he did it. It was an amazing display of both raw intelligence and memory. When we got home, I was really curious about how he did it. So we talked. I pulled out a piece of paper so I could actually write down what he did since he could not write, and what he explained made no sense. Clearly, he was using ratios in some way. But we had not yet covered ratios, so he had no words to describe his intuition. His 15 minutes of insight could not be coded into standard mathematical language. At least not by me. I was at a loss. Because my ds could not write, he did all of his math in his head, and had for years. I often scribed for him, but it was more me showing him what to write down rather than just writing verbatim what he told me to write. So that week during math, I tried to scribe for him by just writing exactly what he told me to write, and it became very clear that he had no idea. None. He could get the answer because of his mathematical insight, but he could not code it. Over the next year I came to understand that this was a piece of his dysgraphia. He could not *code* his thinking into mathematical language of expressions and equations. He thinking was web-like and based on intuition, it was not linear or really logical, and certainly not structured in a standard way. And I came to believe that this was going to be a bigger and bigger problem as he advanced in math. Given his amazing mathematical intuition, it would be sad for him to be limited in math because he could not write it down. His mathematical insight needed a strong linear, logical foundation of writing to be put to great use in higher math. This was the beginning of my journey to *teach* him *how* to show his work. It was absolutely not about showing *his* work because *his* work was a jumble of insight that could not be written down. It was about rewiring a piece of his brain so that he could take that jumble and code in into linear logical steps. This took 3 years. But this process showed me that there is more than one reason why students don't show *their* work. My son had to be trained not just which steps to write, but how to *think* like a mathematician. Intuition is a wonderful ability to have, but it simply won't get you far in math without proper mathematical thinking. And writing is thinking made clear. If you cannot write it, you are not thinking it. My point is, to ask a student to show *her* work, is the wrong approach in my opinion. You need to train a student to write the workings in a certain way, and that certain way when repeated day after day, year after year, will train a student to see math differently. It is no different than practicing scales in violin, over many years you train the ear to hear if notes are out of tune. Drill is what is required. So for my son, he had to drill proper workings to be able to train his brain to think linearly and logically. To do it the other way -- show your jumbled workings so I can see what you are thinking -- is to miss half of what teaching kids math is all about. Ruth in NZ

Dysgraphia as described by my son at the age of about 14: It is not a processing speed problem. It is as if I'm missing a piece of my brains that allows it to make automated movements. Each different letter is not a single sign, it is a collect of strokes that I have to do. Y is 2 strokes; other people have a letter as 1 stroke, they even have whole words as a single movement. I tell my hand to write 'the.' It has no idea how to write 'the'. It tells my brain that. My brain say write a 't'. My hand says which stroke. I say the down stroke. Then it asks what's next. I say the up hook to connect to the h.... I am not drawing letters. I remember when I used to do this when writing thank you notes to grandma, I'm not doing that now. Each letter is composed of 2 or 3 different movements. Some letters are only 1 easy movement like a,e,d. O is hard for me as I do an o as an 'a-stop'. If I don't say stop, I write an a - so an 'o' is two movements. A's are one of the only letters that is automated. N and r are difficult. I naturally do an r, and have to think to extend it to an n. So an n is two steps - an r plus an extension.... The problem is not just in the hand. I have no indecisiveness in my drawings. I want to draw a tree, and I imagine it and it appears on paper. Also, numbers are one stroke, even zeros. Zeros are not like o's as zeros are only 1 movement. They are not an 'a-stop.' For math, I'm not thinking of writing it. An equation in my mind is made incarnate. I think 'x=5', and it appears on paper. I've never had a problem writing numbers. There has never been a mismatch..... It is as if I am on a moving walkway in the airport. My thoughts are like when I walk on the super fast moving walkway. Writing for me is like when you step off. There a physical shock of stepping off and feeling like you are wading through molasses. It is distracting..... When I try to write faster, my hand panics, and it starts to jitter and sends signals to my brain saying 'panic.' This negatively impacts my brain, making it unable to send better and clearer signals to my hand."

I also wrote this post 4 years ago to a question I got: Maintaining a positive attitude and motivation : On 4/21/2019 at 10:38 AM, maikon said: @lewelma, you and your son have put in tremendous effort to achieve these targets in a positive way. Whenever I make any such effort to remediate my son's (9 year old) skills, I face huge protests from him. He would gladly work on it for the first few days or weeks. Gradually he throws tantrums and arguments. He finishes the task with a lot of complaints or bad behaviour that I eventually give up. As you mentioned, it is hard work for both teacher and student. Have you faced any such troubles with your DS while continuing with a task for over several years? How do you maintain your student's motivation and attention for such long periods of time. Most importantly, how do you not lose your patience and up your motivation levels? Can you please share some of your strategies? My response Yes, I have definitely struggled with motivation and with being very discouraged, and yes, I so has my ds. But I think in the end we feel like we are in this together, and we remind each other that bad attitude is not ok. He reminds me as much as I remind him. The most important thing I think I did was to let his strengths run. This approach convinced him that he had skills and talent. So all the stuff I talked about in my previous post was only a small part of his day. We did high-end math orally; he read difficult science books every day; he learned to play the violin; I scribed for him his amazing stories; and his dad read and discussed complex books on numerous topics. Most days he felt like a smart, accomplished kid who had the world in front of him. For the remediation part, I did everything I could to make him feel empowered. I found techniques to try, but I encouraged him to decide what was working and what was not. We focused on metacognition - how does he learn, how can he use his skills to shore up his weaknesses, how long should he work, when can he identify that he is becoming less effective, how can he use the Charlotte Mason habit of "The Way of the Will" - if you don't like a thought, then change it. He was empowered. Everyday. And on days that he could just not do something, we just didn't do it. But we always made a plan to do it later. When he mentioned his older brother and wondered why he had things so good, we would discuss the idea that you cannot be some hybrid person - the best of you and the best of him. You are either ALL your brother or you are yourself. Do you really want all the negatives that your brother has in order to get the positives? The answer was always no. So we focused on him being him. We celebrated what he offered the world that others can't. He has so much charisma that I made sure that he was in lots of activities with lots of positive interactions every day, just check out my siggy. And these activities were not in academics, so he was focusing on *life* not academics, focusing on what he was good at. Basically, I've made sure that his life is 90% positive and uplifting, and 10% remediation and long, difficult, sometimes discouraging work. I also followed his lead on what he needed, and in the end he needed *me*. For a long time, he could not do *anything* on his own. I think there just was a fear of failure, but also simply the inability to write. So for all remediation work, we did it together. I never assigned him something to do on his own that would be hard, because he just wouldn't do it, or couldn't do it. He could write his math, but I had to sit with him. He could read his books, but I had to sit with him. I had to do the dictation, I had to scribe, I had to help him outline. I had to hold his hand all the time. I read posts from people saying 'what can your 9 year do independently?' And I laugh, because only at 13 could my ds play the violin and read his science independently, every single other thing he needed me for. Luckily for me, I only had two children. So I worked 4 hours with my younger before doing 3 hours with my older, then tutoring for 2 hours. If I had had many kids, I'm not sure how this would have played out. People talk about helicopter parenting, and doing too much for a child so they don't become independent. But I have decided those people can just stick their comments where the sun don't shine, because they don't know me and they don't know my kid. As for me, I very much have felt that every day I have to put on my big-girl panties and get the job done. I have found the last 4 years very difficult and draining. But when I signed up to homeschool, I signed up to work. I despised tying-dictation as much as he loved it. And every morning, I would get my cup of tea and my chocolate, and find it in myself to tolerate 30 minutes of correcting word for word his spelling. I just did it because I had to, and I put a smile on my face and joy in my voice no matter what I was feeling inside. And luckily for me I read posts early on from some of the old timers on this board who discussed how kids pick up speed in high school, and how a 13 year old is a very different learner from a 17 year old, which helped me trust that he would pick up speed as he matured. I focused on keeping track of the very small improvements that I saw over the months. It is easy to lose track of incremental change when you have a project that you have broken down into 1000 pieces for 1000 days. Can you actually see 1/1000th of an improvement each day? Well, I tried to. And whatever I saw that was positive step forward each day, I would tell my ds to let him see his improvement, to help him believe in himself and in the work we were doing. I kept a journal with ideas and success stories, reviewed every term what we had accomplished, and then made a plan for the next term to build on our successes. Once a year, I would make a huge list of everything we had done, so although the daily improvements were small and often hard to see, the annual improvements were huge. When I got blue, I would remember how far we had come the previous year, and trust that my incremental daily program would produce similar results in the current year. Some days, I kept myself going by thinking about the boy my son would have been had he attended school. The boy who would have failed everything, who would think he was stupid, who likely would have dropped out by now. This is the alternative reality that existed for my son, and I remind myself that it is through my hard work and dedication that it is a fate he avoided. Ruth in NZ

I have written a lot about our journey over the years, and I've saved the posts. So I'm about to give you a lot. lol. Hope it helps... Remediation program I did from the age of 11- 16 (I wrote this when he was 16, he is now 20 so I have more to say!) I did not know that younger ds had dysgraphia until about the age of 11. Before that I think I was just scaffolding so much that I simply couldn't see it. I finally had him tested at age 12. His dysgraphia falls into 5 categories: 1) Spelling: When ds was first learning to spell in primary school, I didn't realize he had dysgraphia. Because I had already used SWR with my older, I used it with my younger to made sure that his phonological skills were excellent, that he knew every single letter combination, that he knew every single rule for adding endings. All of this was like the back of his hand. SWR is a powerful program. But younger ds could still not spell. What was lacking was automation. So after 3 years of SWR, we tried 7 other spelling programs! Clearly, my head was end the sand, as I never even considered getting him tested. At the age of 12, he was still sounding every single word out. The problem was automation. I think 'cat' and write 'cat' without thinking, this was not true for him for any word except 'the.' And while sounding out every single word, he would completely loose what he was trying to say in his writing. He would also spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph, all of which followed the rules he had learned so were valid combinations. And he still struggled with recognizing that words he was using in speech were a base word with an ending. So "hiding" was just one thing, not the word 'hide' with the ending 'ing' that he would know the rules for. So if you asked him to add an ending to a word, he could, but if you spoke a word that already had an ending, he would not know how to spell it because he could not see that there was a base word inside it. 2) Punctuation: In addition, at the age of 12, he still had no sense of what a sentence was so was completely unable to add periods let alone commas. We had done grammar with MCT and another program whose name I forget, but he still could not identify a subject or even a verb unless it was an exercise in a textbook. And his language was so complex that it was not easy to show him in his own writing, but practicing punctuating simpler writing never translated into his own because his structure was way more advanced. 3) Physical handwriting: Even today at age 15, he can write numbers, but cannot write words. Basically, his brain is not automating the creation of letters. So an 'o' is an a-stop as he calls it. A's are automated, so to make an 'o' he has to make an a, and then remember to stop the motion to make an 'o'. But interestingly, his brain is fine to make a zero, it is not an a-stop, even though it is the same exact shape. Most of his letters are a combination of 2 strokes that he must recall. Once again, nothing is automated. This means that to physically write a word, not only must he sound it out, he also must recall how to form each letter. Currently at the age of 15.5 he can write very legible handwriting at a top speed of 9 words per minute. 4) Organizing ideas: He has always had beautiful adult-level creative writing, but his report and argumentation writing was impossibly difficult for him. We used IEW for a while, hoping that it would help him with the basics of structure, but he just couldn't implement any system. He couldn't seem to get his thoughts into a set structure. He couldn't remember that he needed an intro sentence and then supporting points and then a conclusion. It wasn't that sentences were jumbled or unclear -- as I said, he has adult-level style with participle phrases, clauses, noun absolutes, advanced vocabulary etc. And if he was on a 'roll', he could produce amazing non-fiction writing. But if ever he was uncertain what to write, he had nothing to fall back on. He could not get anything down. The web of ideas could not be structured into linear form through intellectual effort or outlining. Either he had intuition and flow, or he could write absolutely nothing. There was nothing in the middle. 5) coding mental math into written form: I wrote this in a different post. My solutions: 1) At the age of 11, we decided to do a big push with handwritten work for a full year. The goal was to increase speed. I dictated to him sentences that he had written in previous work. We set timers, we charted progress, we celebrated every small success..... This was an absolute waste of time. He never picked up speed, there was no way to rush him, his spelling did not improve, and all it did was create stress. At the age of 12, we decided to abandon handwriting with the exception of math, and I only wished I had done it sooner. During that year, he had concurrently learned to touch type, but because he could not spell any of the words, he could not go faster than 10 words per minute. People would tell me that spell check would be his friend, but he still had to get the general idea of spelling 'helicopter' for spell check to recognize it. He still had to sound out every. single. word. Words like cat, with, boy... let alone all the big words. He could type 30 words a minute if he was copying, but only 10 if he was having to spell the words. 2) At the age of 12, we abandoned all spelling programs (we had tried about 8 by that time) and switched to typing dictation. I had considered Speech to Text at that point, but my ds and I decided together that we were not ready to go that way as a permanent solution. The goal of typing dictation (as we called it) was to automate the basic words. This dictation was not SWB's dictation where the kid is supposed to hold the sentence in her head; nor was is studied dictation like Spelling Wisdom (which we also tried). The goal of our dictation was automation of spelling. We started to 'Cat in the Hat' because he still could not spell the top 100 words. I would dictate a phrase of like 3-5 words, (I kept to the language groupings to help him begin to hear them), and as he typed I would correct word for word. During this time, I taught him 'think-to-spell' where you purposely mispronounce a word so that the spelling becomes regular (he knew all the rules); we created sounds for all schwas in words; I would help with spelling by simply breaking the words into syllables; I would remind him of basic ending rules, etc. Not a lecture, just as we went with a few words as possible so I didn't break the flow. We worked like this for 30 minutes per day 5 days a week, 45 weeks a year, for 3 years. He loved it. Go figure. Basically, I came to believe that he just needed to put spelling in context of writing, and that he needed immediate feedback when the word was spelling wrong, and that he just needed to do this for many many sentences. Over the years, we slowly moved up the book level to Frog and Toad, then older readers, then Narnia, then other fantasy novels he liked. By the second year, I started punctuation study. I would tell him after a clause "add a comma because its an introductory clause." I would use official grammar words, and not make a lecture, just something quick. But over and over and over. What had been lacking in spelling was automation, and what had been lacking in punctuation was both real world application and drill drill drill. This process worked! It worked beyond all my expectations. And best of all, he loved it. During these years of typing dictation, we also trialed every possible combination to help him organize his ideas (#4 above). We tried a dictaphone, mind-mapping, list making, speech-to-text. We tried me scribing; we tried me scribing only every other paragraph; we tried him verbally saying what he wanted to say 3 times before writing; we tried funny speed games "why is this item the 'best'"; we tried easy topics; we tried hard topics; we tried research; we tried studying other writing; we tried outlining other writing; we tried Ben Franklin's approach of rewrites. We we tried Every. Single. Thing. I could think of. And I just felt like we got nowhere. It was very discouraging for me, although I was very encouraging to him and he never knew that I thought we were spinning our wheels. We were making progress, but it was very very slow. 3) At the age of 15, we quit the typing dictation because I felt that we had made very good progress. He was typing now at about 25 words a minute, he was spelling 80% of words correctly even in difficult books, and could mostly punctuate complex sentences. This was huge given where we started from!! And best of all, ds was feeling good about himself and the progress he had made. Thus, we moved full focus into writing his own content. We started this new focus 6 months ago. Because he is interested in being a geographer and studying complex issues, he wants to be able to research and write up creative solutions to complex problems. He has a goal, and this has been very motivating. We decided to go after deep complex topics with high interest and work with engaging questions which required research and processing and organizing. This seems like a backwards approach, going for difficult writing projects when we had had little success with organizing ideas, but the high interest was the key to the motivation. I figured we would get further with lots of scaffolding for hard projects, than focusing on independence for easy projects. I will admit, however, that I was nervous about taking this approach, because I knew it would be difficult to tell how much of the work was his work vs mine. Now 6 months later, he has written 3 research papers: 1) The causes and consequences of the 2004 Tsunami in Ache Indonesia from a cultural and environmental point of view. 2) An analysis of why the population demographic transitions of Maori vs Europeans in NZ were so different over the past 180 years. 3) the cultural and environmental causes and consequences of the 55-year Wataki Dam Scheme in the South Island. It is hard for me to overstate the success we have had with these 3 projects. Massive massive success. It is as if the three years from 12-15 where we separated out all the skills and worked on them individually, have all come together in a cohesive whole. All those years of working on organizing his ideas that felt like a waste of time, were not. It was seeping in, just not showing up because he could not yet write it all down. I am still scaffolding, and I still have to sit next to him sometimes when he writes, and I have scribed for him a few paragraphs in these reports when he is just too tired but wants to keep the momentum up. However, the scaffolding required for the last paper has been way less than the first paper. And with 2.5 years to go until graduation, I feel that we are finally on track. I will still be remediating and accomodating, but now we are doing this *at level* rather than years behind. 4) The future: we will continue with these large-scale, high-interest projects. I will continue to be highly involved with the research, outlining, writing, and editing -- strongly scaffolding where needed, but slowly ever so slowly backing off and encouraging independence. At this point, we are going to start 2 new ventures into the world of dysgraphia: 1) trying to write up chemistry and physics explanations which he will need to do for his national exams. Scientific explanations are a different type of writing, with different language that he has to learn, but I think he is ready. 2) We are going to actually try to get him to physically write again. He has been writing his math all this time, so his hand is reasonably strong. We are going to start by drilling letters (we did this the other day with lots of giggles given he is 15), and we are going to see if he can write a sentence each day, and see where this leads us. No pressure, but he wants to try. Now, I know I have written a book here. I have done it for two reasons. 1) once I got going I really wanted to document our path as I have never written it all out before. 2) I am hoping to give you a realistic vision of what remediating dysgraphia looks like over the long haul. There is no way around it, dysgraphia is a bitch and impacts all aspects of a child's education. Remediating it is long hard work for both teacher and student, but it can be done in a way that is positive and good for a child's self-esteem. I have never regretted the time and effort I have put into this project. And I had a friend just yesterday say to me that it is amazing that ds is so proud of himself, that he doesn't feel stupid, and that I never discuss him in a negative way. DS does not mind me talking about his dysgraphia because he feels it is a part of who he is, and overcoming its is a testament to his hard persistent work over many many years. I also want you to know that you will likely make many wrong turns, and that you will be wandering in the dark, wondering if your approach is the most optimal. This is just the nature of the beast. As I tried to show, there were things that I did that I shouldn't have done, and there were things that at the time seemed to make no difference, but then later were shown to be incredibly helpful. Good luck to you and your dd. Slow and steady wins the race. Ruth in NZ

We have one boarding school here in Wellington, Scots College. It has a very strong international program and is considered one of the top schools in the country. Here is a link: https://www.scotscollege.school.nz/admissions/international

I use bra extenders. My rib cage is very large due to all the vaulting in gymnastics I did as a kid, and there is no way a standard bra strap will not cut me in half. Bra extenders are cheap and have lots of colours, and I've been know to wear two of them so I can extend the strap out by 4 inches.