Chapter 3

(3.2) Check out tables 3.1 (p. 75), 3.2 (p. 83) and 3.3 (p. 91) with particular attention to the age ranges you are interested in teaching.  Identify your personal favorite ways that an educator can promote a child’s sense of self, perspective taking, and moral reasoning skills.

 Sense of self:  Provide sufficient scaffolding to make success possible. I love this suggestion. Showing children what they can do with just a bit of help can really push them to try more challenging tasks without the fear of complete failure.

Perspective taking: Talk frequently about people’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. This is something that can be done on a daily basis in a prek classroom. During a read aloud story I feel it is important to stop and inspect the illustrations asking the children things like, “how do you think she is feeling?” or “why is she feeling so sad?” This perspective taking can also be done through interactions saying things such as, “It makes me feel angry when you hit me.” or “remember how you felt when someone took your toy.”

Moral Reasoning: A few of the suggestion I like on this category are using induction, comforting others, and encouraging prosocial behaviors. When young children do misbehave it may be because they do not know it could hurt someone else. An example may be a child hits another child out of frustration or anger, typically its not to hurt the child. As a teacher it would be my job to use induction to show the child it hurts when people hit. Since young children are still very egocentric, it can be difficult to promote the comfort of others. I think the best way to encourage this is by modeling. I could show this by often comforting children with both physical touch and words. Young children often consider whatever they are playing with at the time as theirs. As a teacher, it is my job to help children realize more than one person can use an item. I like the how the book suggests this could be done in a constructivist manner by asking things like, “How can we solve this problem?”