Child development and parenting classes were probably the favorite things that I taught. I had the best of both worlds: the high school students, whom I loved, and the little children who just wrapped themselves around my heart. To see the high school students teach the little ones and have the children respond to their teaching was priceless.
In the child development room, we had an observation booth. A third of the class of students worked with the children while the other two thirds observed, using structured observation sheets. The students who worked with the children had the responsibility of planning and executing activities for the children. The high school students were divided into groups who worked together to do the work required of them. We never had a problem with “slackers”. They were generally anxious to work with the children and wanted to have good plans made. We often had people to enter the observation booth unannounced, and the workers wanted to have their day with the children work smoothly.
The room was divided into centers, concentrating attention to specific subjects: a reading center, a numbers center, an art center, puzzles, dress-up center. The students who worked with the children were assigned a center where they were completely in charge, and one student in the group served as the chairman and supervised the group. He or she would sometimes have to step in to take the place of a student who was absent, though absences were rare when the group was working with the children. They loved that day. Their responsibilities in the group rotated with each work day, so they had the opportunity to plan activities in a variety of subjects. Each work day had a theme and the activities must be planned around that theme.
On the days that the children were there, my job was to stay in the observation booth evaluating the students who were working with the children. I never went into the room with the children unless a problem came up that the high school students couldn’t handle. That rarely occurred. Most of the students were so involved with the program that they foresaw any problem and were able to handle it.
The school provided us with a fenced yard where the children participated in outdoor activities. The students carefully planned the outside fun so that the little children were not just freely running about, but were engaged in learning activities too.
As their teacher, I observed extreme maturity taking place in the high school students. They discovered a lot about themselves while they were in the process of learning about children and working with them. Their class time without the children was intense. For one whole semester, we studied the developmental skill patterns in children: how they should behave at certain ages; what was normal and what wasn’t; what happened if they child missed a particular stage of development; how long it took a child to catch up if he did miss a stage of development. All of the class time focused on child behavior, and the students looked for those behavior patterns in their observations. We had several students to go to college to further study child development and early childhood education as a result of taking the child development classes. Some of those students are almost ready to retire from teaching! Doesn’t seem possible!
In the second semester of the class, the students studied parenting skills: responsibilities of being a parents; correct ways to handle a child’s behavior; the relationship between the parent’s behavior and the child’s behavior; the difference between discipline and punishment; allowing a child to suffer or enjoy the consequences of his own behavior; determining factors for a child’s learning; teaching a child to take responsibility for his own behavior as well as his own learning. In addition, we studied home management skills as it would apply to the family. The students put these skills to practice when they planned their programs for the child development room.
The first half-semester that the students were in my class was spent in the study of child development skills. Sometimes it was hard for them to grasp the idea that they had better learn these skill patterns because they would be using them in just a few weeks. Most of them settled down and studied, especially the closer time came for planning for the children. The second half-semester was spent planning for and working with the children.
The third half-semester was spent studying parenting skills, and the fourth half-semester, they worked with the children again. They made visuals and posters, planned skits, decided how the centers would be set up, made written plans for the work to be done on the days that children would be present; tried to decide what a parent would do in certain situations. Again, a surge in maturity took place during the time that they worked with the children and studied what they would do if they were the parent.
The high school students had many opportunities to guide the behavior of the younger children. They used the techniques they had learned during classroom time, and most of them did an excellent job in directing the children. One day, one of the little girls wrote all over a table with a crayon, and the student working with her told her she would have to scrub the marks off the table. She looked with disdain at the student worker and said, ”No, I can’t. I won’t do it.” The student calmly went to get cleanser and a wet cloth and presented it to her. She crossed her little arms, protruded her lips, and sat with a horrible frown on her face. My student sat beside her. The other students and children went outside for play time. The two of them sat! When the rest of the class came in and got ready to have a snack, the little one was not allowed to eat until she cleaned up the table. It didn’t take long until she started scrubbing. When she finished she looked up at the older student, smiled and said, “Now!” That is taking responsibility for one’s own actions! We often do not want to take time to allow a child to do that.
Hopefully, the students who enrolled in those classes learned something that made their family life a little easier. We never know the impact we have when we endeavor to give example – not just teachers, but all of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment