Building Resilience in Children - Positive Outlook

This post will conclude the discussion on building resilience in children.  A positive outlook will be the main theme of this one.

The Definition of a Positive Outlook
Webster defines the word, positive, as "expressed definitely; confident; certain."  Webster defines the word, outlook, as "a view; standpoint."  For the purposes of this post we will define positive outlook as "confident or optimistic point of view."  I like that Webster uses the word "confident and expressed definitely" because that denotes more than just a "happy-go-lucky" frame of mind.  I believe a positive outlook involves a choice and not a characteristic of your personality.  All personality types can make the choice on how they view their past, present, and future.  A person decides by an act of his/her will to let their past destroy them, their present cripple them, and their future terrify them or to learn from their past, enjoy the present, and look forward to the future.  It is a learned skill not something we are necessarily given at birth.

How to Build a Positive Outlook
Many people will say that a positive outlook is something given to you at birth.  It is genetic.  However, that does not represent the truth.  Many people do come into this world more predisposed for a positive outlook than others just like many people come into this world more predisposed to work math problems.  However, just like all people can learn to do basic math, all people can learn to look at life differently.  The trick boils down to self-talk.  How you inwardly talk to yourself during situations and circumstances greatly determines how you handle those situations and circumstances.  Do you talk yourself into failure before you ever begin or do you tell yourself that everything will work itself out?  Successful people have the ability to not overreact to situations and circumstances because they inwardly talk themselves through it.  It is like having a built-in life coach.  People that are not successful talk themselves out of success most of the time before they ever really give it any effort.  Somewhere down the line they have learned the wrong lesson of saving face by having extremely low expectations.  They do not count it as failure because it never really had the chance of success anyway.  We all know people like this.  They live a life of self-fulfilling prophecy of doom all the time.

How do we correct this?  For early childhood educators you can train a child to look at situations as challenges to be conquered, mistakes as opportunities for correcting course, and failures as valuable life lessons.  Young children develop their self talk from the way adults talk to them.  Do you encourage children to work through adversity?  Do you help them see the silver lining in humbling and humiliating circumstances?  Do you help them see their mistakes as learning how not to do something?  This is how you develop a positive outlook in children.

How to Sabotage a Positive Outlook
The largest way to sabotage a positive outlook in children is to model a negative outlook.  Those children in your care will learn 10 times more from what you do instead of what you say.  Therefore, adults, step number one involves cleaning your own house first.  Are you one of those people that lives the self-fulfilling prophecy of doom all the time?  Then you will NEVER be able to instill a positive outlook in the children.  Instead, you will teach the horrible vicious cycle of low expectations and saving face instead of high expectations and positive results.  Listen to yourself.  Do you constantly complain and spin everything in a negative light?  STOP!!!!  Teach yourself to look for the good in every situation.  Even horrible circumstances bring strength and character.  If you lived through it, you grew stronger.  When you learn to see the good, it changes how to talk to yourself.  That changes everything.

After you conquer your own negativity, now it is time to check how you talk to the children.  Believe it or not, you can destroy a positive outlook with seemingly innocent sayings.  Are you constantly telling the children that results do not matter?  Then you are setting them up for failure, low expectations, etc.  Results do matter.  You, the adult, must talk them through their difficulties not around them.  Instead of saying "That's okay.  It doesn't really matter."  You should say, "Keep trying, you might surprise yourself."  Do you put more emphasis on how they feel than what they achieve?  Learning about their feelings is only the first step in developing what many refer to as emotional intelligence, but it must go further.  Negative emotions must be harnessed and controlled.  The end goal must be to help children reach goals and achieve accomplishments.  Do not stop on step one.  Only talking about how they feel without following the whole process out to its logical conclusion, does not produce a child with a positive outlook.  Helping that child overcome negative emotions to become a productive member of society does produce a child with a positive outlook.

Conclusion
This series of posts have been about building resilience in children.  Most people never equate their resilience with the way they talk to themselves but it is highly important.  We must teach our children to see the good in all situations, to be people that learn from mistakes instead of being crippled by failure, and to strive toward accomplishments and goals rather than just existing.  We cannot survive as a society if our citizens do not have resilience.  Someone must rise up and be the adult in the room.  Let us be about raising a generation that can be those adults.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!! https://linktr.ee/natawade

 

Cognitive Development for 4 to 5 year olds - Early Literacy (Part 6)

This post will cover the components Visual Discrimination, Visual Whole-Part-Whole Relationships, and Visual Sequencing (Patterning).  Remember I am taking my information from the Tenn.essee Early Learning Developmental Standards (TN-ELDS).

The first learning expectation is:  Discriminates likenesses and differences in black and white shapes, figures, and designs with subtle differences in detail or orientation.  The performance indicator for this one is:  Selects the figure(s) or design(s) that differ based on fine, internal difference or orientation.  Some four year olds conquer this one and some have great difficulty with this one.  Four year olds that have had practice with this concept as three year olds usually conquer this one easily.  Four year olds that have never been exposed to this concept will sometimes really struggle especially if he/she has a right brain dominance.  This is a left brain activity and left brain dominate children will have an easier time with this than right brain dominant children.  However, even children that have a left brain tendency but have never been exposed to paying attention to detail may still require direct instruction before understanding this concept.

The next learning expectation for the component Visual Discrimination is:  Discriminates likenesses and differences in symbols.  The performance indicator for this one is:  Correctly sorts letters and numerals and can find words that match; names a few letters and numerals.  Most four year olds can sort letters and numerals except for the really confusing ones like "b" "d" and "p" by the time they are five years old.  However, as a preschool teacher I believe it to be of much more importance whether or not they can name the letters and numerals rather than matching words that they may not even be able to read.  Remember, I am in the phonics camp not the whole language camp.  I believe being able to decode words is of much more importance than being able to recognize a word by sight.  We have a phonics based language.  It is crazy to me that we would try to teach our language by sight like one would learn Chinese (which is not phonics based) rather than decoding it.  Many school systems are now switching to a more phonics based approach to reading.  Therefore, we as preschool teachers should spend more time on learning the names and sounds of letters than on the "popcorn word" method of the past.  Believe me, by the time they are third graders, phonics learners can read circles around the their whole language counterparts.  Make sure these children visually discriminate and know the name of the letters and numbers.

The next component is:  Visual Whole-Part-Whole Relationships.  The learning expectation for this one is:  Further develops awareness of relationships of parts and wholes using more abstract figures.  The first performance indicator for this one is:  Completes puzzles of 8-20 pieces.  Five years ago more children conquered this particular indicator, but I have seen with every passing year a drop in the amount of four year olds that cannot even conquer a simple puzzle much less a more complex puzzle.  Puzzles take time and patience both of which is lacking severely in our present culture in adults not to mention children.  A great deal of the emotional situations we are experiencing in greater amounts contribute to the decline in some of these cognitive development milestones.  Ask any kindergarten teacher and he/she will tell you that it takes a good month or two to pull up the emotional maturity of the children coming through the doors before they can even begin to conquer academic concepts.  As a preschool teacher I had to spend 3/4 of my time on emotional development in order to be able to teach the basics of academic content.  I had to directly teach children to do puzzles and most of that involved learning to keep going even when it was hard.  It is not that the children do not necessarily have the cognitive ability to figure out puzzles.  They simply do not have the emotional maturity to stay after a task they find difficult.  Puzzles may bring hissy fits but a smart teacher understands that staying after this one kills two birds with one stone.

The second performance indicator for this component is:  Reproduces a 2-dimensional design with parts that vary by color and shape; constructs representations of objects from parts, with no model.  This one is not conquered by most kindergarteners much less four year olds.  Many, many children struggle horribly with abstract concepts especially when dealing with recreating without modeling.  I have found that children that are not exposed to academic content at three years old will not conquer abstract concepts until they are five or six years old.  A foundation must be laid for their brains to assimilate information in this way.  If they do not get the foundation at three, it must be laid at four.  If they do not get the foundation at four, it must be laid at five.  This is why many children arrive at kindergarten not ready for academic content.

The last component for this post is:  Visual Sequencing (Patterning).  The learning expectation is:  Uses left-to-right and top-to-bottom scanning; observes and reproduces a pattern with 3-dimensional objects by using a 2-dimensional paper model.  The performance indicator for this one is:  Reproduces simple color, size, and shape patterns from a paper model.  I have had four year olds that conquered this one but not many.  Many, many children today struggle with patterns.  I have found this to be one of those areas I have had to teach directly, and it usually takes the children 3-6 months to conquer the concept.  They must first be able to replicate a pattern using 3-dimensional objects before you can expect them to use a model to replicate a pattern.  I will start with connecting blocks and do simple 2 color patterns until they understand what makes a pattern.  Then I will move on to more elaborate patterns using 3-dimensional manipulatives.  Once I see that they fully understand the concept, then I will move on to paper models and 3-dimensional materials.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!! https://linktr.ee/natawade