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Whole Child Development

Positive Guidance Tools of the Trade – Validate and Reflect Feelings

by Filed Under: Positive Guidance and Social Skills Leave a Comment

Have you ever frustrated or angry?  I mean really frustrated or angry?  Almost beyond words?  Doesn’t that just add to the aforementioned frustration?  Well, imagine being a child.  (It shouldn’t be too hard, I’m pretty sure you were one once.)  Young children are bombarded with emotions just as intense as our own – if not more so as they are not tempered with the same reason and justification we can sometimes muster.  These little ones feel just as frustrated and angry as we ever could, but have even less of an ability to verbalize it.  Too often, that results in some other manifestation or communication of the emotion.  This is when we usually see the tantrums, the biting, the hitting, the kicking, etc., etc., etc.  How do we as adults usually respond?  We swoop in, console the victim and cite the offender, lecturing them about that behavior.  We see it as a failure to behave properly, when often, it is a failure to communicate properly.

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Positive Guidance Tools of the Trade – Problem Solving

by Filed Under: Child Development & DAP, Positive Guidance and Social Skills Leave a Comment

Teachers and parents of young children are notoriously good problem-solvers.  When discontent arises, we swoop in, assess the situation, and set timers, create turn-taking lists, grab another item for sharing, or utilize some other method from our bag of tricks.  We are so good at problem solving because we get so much practice!  This is all well and good, and at times a skill of survival, but to truly benefit children for the long run, it is ideal to involve them in the problem solving process.  It may slow things down a bit, but eventually you will find that you are “swooping in” less and less as the children build their own sets of social problem-solving skills and become more independent.

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Positive Guidance Tools of the Trade – Using Humor

by Filed Under: Child Development & DAP, Create, Positive Guidance and Social Skills Leave a Comment

Often what is needed to head off a full-blown melt-down is just a little humor to lighten things up and regain perspective.  Let me give you an example.  Recently, I had spent a full day washing every dirty article of clothing in our house.  A small feat in itself.  I hadn’t, however, folded any of it yet.  So at the end of the day, I was exhausted, folding laundry on my bed, just trying to get to the bottom of it so I could climb in!  Well, my five year-old came in, with body language and a voice that conveyed that he just might try a bit of whining and fit-throwing to get his way as he said, “But I wanted to sit there!”  I responded that the bed was “closed”.  Then realizing the humor, said, “Get it?  The bed is closed with clothes!”  He paused for a moment, then his five year-old logic grasped it and his whole demeanor changed.  He visibly relaxed, laughed a bit, and then moved to another part of the room to settle in and talk to me about something else.

Humor is an excellent distraction.  It lightens the mood and shifts attention, often facilitating either natural or adult-prompted redirection.  It’s not always the children who are the ones who need to lighten up.  They’re naturals at funny business.  In fact, I recently read that, on average, a child laughs 300 times each day, while an adult laughs only 15 times each day.  So it’s logical that humor would be a natural tool to use when working with children.

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Soup from a Stone?

by Filed Under: Building Readers, Learning through Play and Experience, Positive Guidance and Social Skills, Snack Time Leave a Comment

The story of Stone Soup is a popular old fable that has been retold countless ways.  (If you need to brush up on the tale, you can find books at the library or online, and can even find online versions here and here.)  You can help your children be a part of this timeless story as you do some story acting and then share some soup together!

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Positive Guidance Tools of the Trade – Redirection

by Filed Under: Child Development & DAP, Positive Guidance and Social Skills Leave a Comment

I’m hoping you’ve spent enough time in your life observing water to understand the following analogy (and if you work much with preschoolers, I’m sure that you have).  Imagine water running down a slight decline.  It’s spreading and gaining speed, and headed right for , say, your favorite book.  Destruction is imminent.  And so you yell, “Stop!  Water, stop!  For goodness sake, STOP!”  Does it work?  Of course not.  There’s too much momentum already at play.  You try to stop it artificially by creating a dam. That seems to work for a moment, but soon the water rises, until it overflows and heads right for your treasured tome once again.  Then you have an idea.  A brilliant idea, by the way.  You divert the water by digging a quick ditch, taking it in another direction.  You redirect the water to a thirsty flower bed and both your book and the flowers are saved.  You really are amazing, you know!  Now, why did I tell you a random story about water?  I hope that will soon be clear!

I want you to imagine now, a child whose behavior is undesirable, or inappropriate, or threatening certain destruction to person, property, or yes, even your favorite book.  As I mentioned in last week’s post, it isn’t enough to say “Stop”.  We have to describe the behavior we want.  That may mean describing appropriate behavior, as we discussed last week.  Sometimes, what is required is to redirect the behavior.  Just as in the water example, there’s already momentum in the action, there’s already a need the child is trying to fill; the need to jump, the need to climb, the need to color.  As we redirect, we move the momentum from an inappropriate or destructive direction into an appropriate, constructive direction.  For example, moving from jumping off the tables into jumping off safe structures at the playground; from climbing up the bookshelves to climbing up a step ladder or climbing toy; from coloring on the wall to coloring at an easel.

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Preschool Christmas Party – The Spirit of Giving

by Filed Under: Celebrate!, Learning through Play and Experience, Positive Guidance and Social Skills, Snack Time 4 Comments

With Thanksgiving just now appearing in our rearview mirrors, it’s time to start  planning for Christmas!  Most everyone needs a Christmas party idea.  Whether you call it a  “Christmas Party” or “Winter Celebration” or what have you, most preschools have some kind of celebration at the end of the year.  Now whether  you teach at a public or private school may have a lot to do with how you  celebrate this time of year.  Regardless of those classifications, I’ve found that a service party fits the bill.  And surprisingly, I don’t think the children have ever been disappointed by the fact that this party is more about others than about them.  Quite honestly, I think they take great pride in being able to help others.  In addition to fostering pro-social skills, it makes them feel important, bigger, and more powerful.  Those are things all preschoolers crave (though I think I know a few adults who crave them too)!

Here’s how it’s worked for me in the past.  Read through it and make adjustments for your group based on their ages and ability levels, your center’s policies and procedures, and the needs of people in your local area.  It has worked particularly well to have parents attend and help their little kiddos through this series of simple service activities.  I start out with a story for everyone, then I explain the tables with projects, and from there, we basically have a “free-choice” time, where the parents and children just choose which project they would like to work on next.

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