Providing Unobtrusive Help

06/28/2010

Children everywhere, when they are free to do so and have plenty of playmates, spend enormous amounts of time playing. They play to have fun, not deliberately to educate themselves, but education is the side effect for which the strong drive to play evolved.
Peter Gray, Psychologist

If one favors a child-oriented approach in your curriculum, your approach may encourage teachers to let children solve their own problems, be responsible for their own achievements. However, in her book, Little Kids, Big Worries: Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms, Alice Honig suggests there are times when a bit of teacher intervention may be just the right thing to do:

"Children can accomplish some tasks on their own after trying hard. Others are too easy or too difficult. Children get restless and bored when toys or tasks are too easy. They feel frustrated when tasks are too challenging. The Russian child-development theorist Vygotsky taught that teachers are priceless in supporting child learning and accomplishment when a task is just a bit too difficult at the child's present level of development. Then a teaching adult provides just that bit of help that will result in further child learning and satisfaction. Vygotsky used the term 'zone of proximal development' for the difference between what a child can do on his or her own compared with what the child can do with adult help. With the assistance of an adult, a child will be able to succeed at a cognitive or social learning task beyond what he or she could have accomplished alone."

Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms

Alice Honig's insightful book, Little Kids, Big Worries: Stress-Busting Tips for Early Childhood Classrooms, is now available from Exchange. Research shows that stress in the crucial early years of a child's life can pose dramatic, lasting challenges to development, learning, and behavior. This is the practical book early childhood professionals need to recognize stress in young children — and intervene with proven relief strategies before pressures turn into big problems. Developed by celebrated early childhood expert Alice Sterling Honig, this guidebook helps readers address the most common causes of stress in a young child's life, including separation anxiety, bullying, jealousy, and family circumstances.

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For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.