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What can you do to help your child when they are having a bad day? Firstly as a parent, understand that there is a whole range of emotional reactions to learning. Negative emotions may include showing anger, anxiety or frustration.
Some children react by avoiding or blaming the task or other people. Others may give the impression of being unenthusiastic or uncooperative.
We may think that negative emotions from our children are bad
I like to think that knowing how you feel is the first step towards changing things for the better.
In my eBook, How to Motivate Your Child, I invite you to share, with your child, an empowering message, “It’s OK to feel like that.”
Building emotional resiliency
The first step in building emotional resiliency is knowing how you feel.So, believe it or not, there really is an upside for all that pain, grief and drama. Your child is developing an awareness of their feelings and learning to express them.
The next step is dealing with those feelings in a manner which builds up the child’s emotional resiliency. Their ability to bounce back from set backs and know that their “bad day” will pass.
A resource to help 4 to 10 year olds develop an understanding that we all have good and bad days, is Judith Viorst’s classic, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. When everything goes wrong for Alexander, he is consoled that other people have bad days too.
If you live in California, you may be lucky enough to catch the adaption as a live performance by the California Theatre Company. For the rest of us we can buy the book find it in a local library or enjoy with your child this adaptation online.
There are many ways a book like this can help your child, who is having a bad day. You can see some ideas here.
I’ve found Alexander’s plight, opens children up to a lot of spontaneous comments about their own bad days. You could also use these questions as starters:
What would you say to Alexander?
What could his family have done to help him?
Have you ever had a day like this?
and then
Retell the story where everything goes right
Sharing ideas for coping with a bad day
What can you do if something like this happens to you?
One answer is talk to someone you trust.
I’m interested in what helps your child and their reactions to this hilarious book.
I often talk about the importance of really listening to your child. To me, really listening means actively and reflectively listening to what your child is saying.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But, all too often as we listen, we quickly spin off into our own thoughts and interpret what we hear. Then we start to frame an answer, to solve our child’s problem for them, even before they’ve even finished telling us!
Do you find yourself doing that? I know I do.
Why do we go into our own thoughts instead of staying present with what our child is saying?
Often it’s because we want to save them! We want to soften their load and save them from hurt, but what we can actually end up doing is diminish their opportunity for self growth, hinder their problem-solving skills and lessen their independence.
How to you listen effectively to your child?
Communicating with your child, with anyone for that matter, can go wrong in so many ways that it’s a wonder that we understand each other at all. Some people are good at one side of the communication equation and not the other. Great at talking and not listening, for example.
And even if we are generally good listeners, the stress of our fast-paced modern life, can often render the best of us, unable to focus on the things that are really important, like our child’s self-esteem.
Developing Effective Listening Skills
According to Anne Kotzman in her informative book, Listen To Me, Listen To You: A practical guide to improving self-esteem, listening skills and assertiveness, there are three main clusters of skills involved in listening attending, following and reflecting.
Simply put, in order to listen effectively you need to be present in the moment and give your child your full attention. Next you need to show empathetic silence and finally restate in your own words your child’s words/feelings showing your understanding.
One of the easiest things you can to build your child’s self belief as a learner is to show them, “how they are smart”.
To me, each child is unique. Each have their own personality and interests and their own unique learning style.
You can see my “smarts” in the diagram. Answering a few simple questions online can give your child a visual sense of how they are smart. This can lead to your child opening up about what they love to do and also give you both a clue as to the best way for them to learn.
An example of this, if I see one of my students scores highly on “Body Smart” and they have yet to develop automatic recall of number facts (like …three, twos are six) then I’ll go outside with them and play handball and we’ll say the number facts, in rhythm, as we play. It’s fun and takes advantage of their learning style.
If you’d like to use this simple tool with your child to find out more about their unique learning style, go here. There’s an audio as well as a written version, and it’s also available in some community languages. Let me know how you go.
A few minutes ago I listened to a post-match interview with Roger Federer at the Australian Open. Federer had just defeated Andy Roddick and progressed to the final. One of Federer’s first comments was how he played well because he had confidence. Self-confidence is the result of positive self-talk.
How do we help our children to develop self-confidence?
Here’s a 4 step plan. Awareness → Understanding → Skills → Practice
To develop positive self-talk your child needs to:
Step 1: become aware of what they are saying to themselves, in their thoughts.
Step 2: understand that those thoughts influence their behaviour, for better or worse
Step 3: develop their own set of positive self-talk phrases, for example;
I can do it.
I’m good enough.
If I want to, I can.
It doesn’t matter if I make a mistake.
I can make it happen.
If I try hard, I’ll get there.
Step 4: practice, catching themselves being positive with their self-talk
I have found some great action plans and although they have been written for classroom use, you can easily adapt to use at home with your children. They are suitable for children of school age, 5-18 years. You can Download Your Positive Self-Talk Action Plans here.
The lesson plans are copyright of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.
Here’s some of my favourite websites with excellent English Language Learning Resources
Dave’s ESL Cafe One of the best comprehensive sites with interactive resources, bookstore, teaching ideas, links to ESL sites, job information and a discussion centre.
English Club Very comprehensive British site for teachers and learners. Provides lesson plans, teacher forum, job centre, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation activities.
Vocabulary Incorporates 40 topics with over 1500 English words and phrases along with audio. Requires Flash version 7 and Java script
English Zone Skills based lesson ideas and worksheets
Most current theorists of Second Language Acquisition seelearning as a continuum. That is, there are predictable and sequential stages of language development, in which the learner progresses from no knowledge of the new language to a level of competency closely resembling that of a native speaker.
Their theories have resulted in the identification of several distinct stages of second language development.
These distinct stages of second language development are most often identified as
Stage 1- Silent/Receptive
Stage 2- Early Production
Stage 3- Speech Emergence
Stage 4- Intermediate Fluency
Stage 5- Continued Language Development.
As a parent, teacher or tutor of a second language student; understanding that students are going through a predictable and sequential series of developmental stages helps you predict and accept a student’s current stage, while modifying your instruction to encourage progression to the next stage.
Further to this, a concept endorsed by most language acquisition theorists is Stephen Krashen’s “comprehensible input” hypothesis, which suggests that learners acquire language by “intaking” and understanding language that is a “little beyond” their current level of competence (Krashen, 1981, p. 103).
For instance, a preschool child already understands the phrase “Get your crayon.” By slightly altering the phrase to “Get my crayons,” the teacher can provide an appropriate linguistic and cognitive challenge— offering new information that builds off prior knowledge and is therefore comprehensible (Sowers, 2000).
Providing consistent, comprehensible input requires a constant familiarity with the ability level of students in order to provide a level of “input” that is just beyond their current level.
Another theory that has directly influenced classroom instruction isCummins’s distinction between two types of language
basic interpersonal communications skills (BICS) and
cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).
Research has shown that the average student can develop conversational fluency within two to five years, but that developing fluency in more technical, academic language can take from four to seven years depending on many variables such as
Factors influencing Second Language Learning
age of learner
motivation of learner
aptitude of learner
personality of learner
degree of exposure to L1
formal vs informal learning
quality of instruction literacy in L1
degree of similarity between L1 and L2 (eg phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, etc)
Understanding that language learners are going through a predictable and sequential series of developmental stages helps you predict and accept a student’s current stage, while modifying your instruction to encourage progression to the next stage.
You probably know that the words we speak to our children have a powerful influence over the attitudes they develop, right? And this in turn, has a huge impact on their motivation.
I’ve discovered this is true, from infancy to adulthood. The child’s development of healthy self-motivation is modeled on what they hear and see in their home/school environment.
But, sometimes as parents we get busy and tired. If only we had a few key phrases to share with our children; a selection of empowering messages, that would influence our child long after we have said them.
My personal research has uncovered, “motivational messages” that inspire your child to achieve success in learning.
You can get your copy of these by adding your name and email over to the right. I’ll send them to you right away.
What can you do to help your child when they are having a bad day? Firstly as a parent, understand that there is a whole range of emotional reactions to learning. Negative emotions may include showing anger, anxiety or frustration.
One of the easiest things you can to build your child’s self belief as a learner is to show them, “how they are smart”.
