Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 6 student in Coburg, Victoria, Australia.
Mia and I were best friends in Year 4. We did everything together. We sat together at lunch, picked each other for group work, and spent whole weekends at each other's houses. But in Year 5, something shifted. It happened slowly at first, so slowly that I almost didn't notice. At the start of Year 5, Mia joined the netball team and made new friends on the court. I was not interested in netball. I preferred art and staying inside at lunch. Mia began spending more time with her new teammates. She would rush off to training and come home late. When we hung out, she talked mostly about netball. I felt like I was being pushed aside. For a while, I was angry. I thought Mia was being unfaithful to our friendship by having other friends. I would sit alone at lunch and think about how much things had changed. But then something happened that made me realise I had been unfair. One afternoon, Mia asked me to come and watch her netball match. I went, expecting to be bored. But I watched her run and jump and play with such joy that I understood something: Mia having other friends didn't mean she was leaving me behind. It meant she was finding parts of herself that she loved. After that day, our friendship felt different but not broken. We still talk, but not every day. We still care about each other, but we are not always in the same spaces anymore. This is okay. I learnt that friendship doesn't always stay the same shape. Sometimes it grows sideways instead of deeper. Sometimes having space makes a friendship stronger, not weaker. And sometimes understanding someone else's joy is a way of loving them.