During this week we continued working on providing the children with tools to verbalize their feelings and help them understand our emotions. As it has been few weeks now, we start to observe the children to use their new skills in everyday social interactions i.e. “No, thank you,” “Stop, I don’t like that,” “Can I have it after you are done using it?”
Every morning we begin our meeting with a welcome song and we ask the children how are they feeling at the moment. The children seem to be more confident in indentifying their feelings. Here are some of the great examples:
Conversations from today:
Zara: “What nervous mean?”
Vivi: “You know, sometimes James likes to climb chairs at home and it makes my mommy nervous. “
Teacher: “That would make me feel nervous.”
Zara: “Are you nervous?”
Teacher: “No, no at this moment but I feel nervous when someone stands on a chair instead if sitting on it. It makes me nervous because I am afraid they will fall and get hurt.”
Vivi: “Yeah, like James. He is hurt under his eye because he fell.”
Zara: “I got blood (she shows her finger with a bandage on it). I got hurt.”
How are you today?
Graydon: “I feel BRAVE because I am wearing a Superman t-shirt.”
Valdi: “ I feel frighten when someone pushes me. Today I wanted my dinosaur and someone pushed me. I cried. I felt sad.”
Sam: “ I am sad because I miss my mommy and daddy. But I am happy, my mommy is picking me up.”
In addition to the study of children’s identity, here and there we could hear the children talking about themselves, their names, and their families. Today, the children had a conversation among each other about who is a boy and who is a girl in our room. The children incorporated math into the conversation as Vivi and Graydon went around the classroom to count boys and girls.
As the children continue practicing signing in we also observe them recognizing each other’s names. We also started to mention last names.
Helping children to recognize and celebrate who they are in a fun way is important and helps them find a good emotional balance. We look forward to seeing what else the children will bring into their conversations and build from there.
