Blog Reflection #5

My Top 5 Favorite Concepts/ Skills for Guiding Young Children

Personal Message:
The personal message to a child is probably my number one favorite thing I have learned in this class. It has been the most beneficial in working with children. It can be used positively as well as to  correct mistaken behaviors. A personal message is a wonderful way to get children to move from amoral to internalization self discipline. When giving a personal message you first reflect using a behavior, paraphrase or affective reflection. This allows the adult to really see and tell the child what they saw, letting the child know what the adult is seeing. It also give the adult time to count to 10 instead of just getting very upset, when really they might have missed something. The second part of a personal message is to react. You need to tell the child your emotion about what just happened focusing on their behavior. Third is to give the child the reason you feel that way or the reason they shouldn't be doing something. Lastly you give a rule if there is property or safety involved. Rules must be positive, so instead of saying "don't run", you would say, "you need to walk". Knowing how to give a personal message has made me feel able/ capable to handle my emotions when working with children at the same time as helping them.

Self Discipline:
Learning the difference between the four stages of self-discipline have really helped me know how to better understand where a child is coming from. Most of the time children just haven't learned to internalize what they are doing. They still need help from adults to know what they are doing is right or wrong. Amoral orientation is when they have no concept of right or wrong, like a baby. Adherence is when a child needs an adult or someone else to monitor their actions. Identification is when children adopt behaviors to someone they look up to. They start doing and behaving like this person. The problem is that if a situation arises and they don't know what that person would do they don't know what to do. Internalization is where we want to be, as adults and we want our children to get here too. When we get to this stage we internalize what is right and wrong and do what is right because it is the right thing to do. Knowing this makes me want to do everything I can to teach and guide children to internalize their actions.

Communicating about relationships:
How an adult communicates to a child has a huge impact on the child. By the way we as adult treat them tells them about the relationship we have with them. Time, warmth, and power tell these children how we feel about them. Sometime we get busy and don't mean to respond the way we do. Children don't have the concept of time we do. They need to know that we care about what they are doing, so if we take even just a few minutes to let them know we are listening and that they are important it will have a great effect on them. Warmth has to do with our non verbal cues towards them, our facial expressions and vocal characteristics not just our words. We may mean to say something nice but if it comes out the wrong way it could hurt a child's feelings. Adults have power over almost every aspect of a child's learning, but knowing that we need to look at how we are treating them and asking them to do things.

Reflections:
Behavior reflections and paraphrase reflections are good tools for teachers to use to let children know you are listening and paying attention to what is going on in their world. A behavior reflections is when we as teachers tell the child what we see them doing. This also helps them put words to what they are doing. Paraphrase reflections are statements of what a child has just told you. They know you are listening to what they have to say. It also helps when you may misunderstand what a child has told you. You can retell what you heard and if you are wrong they will let you know and tell you again. These reflections can be part in many different ways of talking to children and gives teachers and children the power to understand each other.

Consequences:
Positive, natural, logical, and unrelated are all consequences which teachers use. Some are better than others and each help children learn get the the internalization self-discipline stage. Teachers should use positive and natural consequences. Natural consequence don't need teacher intervention, children learn that when they do something, something bad might happen and no one else has anything to do with it, it was just what they did. Positive consequence are good because who doesn't like someone saying something nice to them. Logical consequences should also be used when the other two don't fit in. When a child does something wrong they can do it over again, rehearsal, do something to make it better, restitution, or have a loss of privilege. The consequences that should be used least of all are unrelated consequences. These consequences don't have anything to do with their action. Because it is different than their action teachers need to make sure that they have the same timing, such as, you don't get to go to centers until you hang up your coat.