Learning Portfolio Part Three

Part One:

Erik Erikson’s stage of initiative vs. guilt happens during the preschool years.  This is when children begin to develop a conscience and start to feel guilt for their actions.  They also discover that they can use all their skills to actually accomplish tasks and that sometimes these tasks lead to praise and sometimes they lead to punishment.

                                                          Quinton Baking

Quinton discovers he can help mom bake a cake and he pours the flour into the mixer but misses and ends up spilling most of the flour on the counter and on himself while mom isn’t looking. In excitement he looks at mom and exclaims, “ Look mom! I did it!”  Mom see’s nothing but the mess and gets mad at him for making a mess. This leads to Quinton feeling guilty for making the mess when all he really wanted to do was help make a cake.

In the video above, although hesitant, the mother does not stop the child from making a mess, yet allows him to continue to do what he is doing.

Parental/caregiver understanding is important in this stage, if the child doesn’t have an understanding parent and caregiver it will do mostly harm in their development. Children at this stage need an abundant amount of opportunities for exploration and caregivers who support their exploration as well to better them developmentally.

Without this exploration and support this can lead to a child’s lowered self- esteem and a feeling that they are not good enough and will lead to a lot of experiences in life being squished by two words, “I can’t.”  Without the belief in themselves they will give up before they even start, and this is what Erikson was trying to get us to realize when he introduced the stage of initiative vs. guilt.

Part Two

In order to positively influence the children in my classroom and insure that they gain a sense of initiative through interactions, I would start by looking at the environment.  It is really important for the children’s environment to have plenty of choices of things to play with.  I would try to gain as much material as I can to insure that no matter what the child wanted to do, there was an option to do that.  In some cases I have gone to daycare centres and experienced the educators in the room telling the children that certain centres were not open.  This would not be the case in my classroom, I would allow the children to go to whatever centre they wanted and have them all open in order for them to always be able to choose what activities they could do.

Another thing I would do is to allow plenty of time for new activities to be introduced into the classroom.  I would create an idea bin out of an old shoebox and encourage the children to enter their ideas into the bin whenever they thought them up.  Together we would write the idea down on the paper and they would insert it into the bin so that they felt more involved in the whole planning process. I would then pick them out periodically and make sure to address the individual who put the idea in the box (after first asking them if they wanted to be addressed so I do not make that individual feel uncomfortable.) “Frankie has an idea for a craft today, if anyone would like to participate it will be over here,” I would ask the individual child if they would like to run the craft as well and take on the ‘teacher” role.  This would give them the chance to be a leader to their peers and run an activity that is important to them.

                                                             Idea Box I Created

The most important part to my classroom would be the fact that I would be constantly listening to the children.  If I heard them talking about something they are interested in I would ask them more questions to find out exactly what it was. I would then plan my curriculum around that to help them learn more about exactly what they were interested in, and not just a variation of it.

Child – “I wonder how they get houses to stand up straight?”

Teacher – “ How do you think that it stays up? Do you know who builds houses? How long do you think it takes to build a house? Is that something you would be interested in learning more about? “

This helps to get a better understanding of exactly what a child is interested in so that they feel like they are an important part of the classroom and to better help them build their self-esteem. You can pin down exactly what they are interested in learning instead of loosely basing your curriculum off of a single phrase.

                                                      Real Tools in Play

In this case she may be interested in the actual build of the house, in which case I would create a work station using real tools and materials and possibly find a guest speaker to come in and talk about construction.

All of these things can help a child really break out of their shell and feel like an important individual, but not only can it do that, it can help their peers see them as one as well.