A kid’s best friend
“When Joshua was introduced to Sunny it just made everything so much easier.” – Rebecca, mother
A young boy, aged eight or nine, sits on the carpet in the open-plan hallway outside his classroom. Described as selective nonspeaking by his teachers, the boy is bathed in morning sunlight streaming in through a full-length window, his focus on the eager dog sitting in his lap as he gently rubs its ears and feeds it another treat.
At first both silent and hesitant, within a few minutes the boy’s reticence evaporates, and the words slowly begin. “Sunny is my favourite,” he says. “She’s such a lovely dog. She’s always so good. She feels nice.”
His words, just a trickle at first, slowly become a stream, and then a torrent and suddenly sentences are tumbling from this “non-speaking” boy as though Sunny has thrown an inner switch. It’s a startling transformation, and one that simply didn’t happen until Sunny arrived at the Central Coast Grammar School (CCGS), at Erina on the NSW Central Coast, a little
