Archive for the ‘child development’ Category
Making faces
We learn about emotions from our earliest interactions as babies with our parents and carers. For lots of children who have experienced early trauma or neglect, understanding and expressing their own emotions and reading others’ facial expressions can be difficult.
Not knowing how you feel, how to say how you feel or how to work out how others feel leads to misunderstandings in lots of areas including at home, with friends and at school.
We used to play a game when the kids were younger to help with naming and understanding emotions and facial expressions. It’s really easy – you just need a mirror, you and your child…
Step 1 name an emotion – happy/excited/sad/angry etc
Step 2 both look into the mirror and make the face!
Step 3 back to step 1, taking it in turns to name the emotion…
Dead easy and lots of fun. I still do it with the kids now that they are older – we don’t need the mirror, we just make faces at each other!
Other things that can help are naming emotions for your child… ‘it seems to me like you’re angry about that…’, it helps them name what they are feeling and build their vocabulary of emotions.
What things have you found help make sense of emotions?
This post was inspired by Misreading Facial Expressions written by my friend, Naomi Richards aka The Kids’ Coach
Related posts:
Noticing
Bruised before birth
The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (TACT) are running a series of conferences in the UK for professionals, parents and carers about the complexities faced by a child with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) or Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) and strategies and supports that can help.
FASD affects a number of children who are fostered or adopted and it can affect things like speech and language processing, cause and effect thinking and ability to concentrate. Awareness of different strategies and supports will help both children and families to deal with the impact of FASD.
There are still places left for the conference in Edinburgh this week (Thursday 10th March) and there’s another conference in London on 30th March if that’s closer for you.
I’m going to the Edinburgh conference – let me know if you’re going too…
Support for learning
The summary of a recent report concluded that children were being “wrongly labelled as having special educational needs”. This sparked a debate about the pros and cons of diagnoses and labels of special educational needs. Some parents felt that the right diagnosis meant that children received additional support, others that it limited expectations of children or that additional support was not always provided.
My own experience is that some children would do better with additional support in school but, without a formal recognition of need, the provision of additional support is dependent on individual teachers and resources.
In adoption, early trauma and neglect impact on a child’s development and can lead to the need for additional support with learning. Areas like language processing affect how well children understand instruction and can cause problems in all subject areas, even in games and P.E. Poor concentration, low self esteem and problems with social relationships all have a knock on effect on learning
What are your views… has your child had support for learning, has it helped? Do you think labels are helpful?
Back to school…
It doesn’t seem that long since my summer holiday post and now we’re into our second week back at school with the novelty of getting organised for school fast wearing off…
School requires a whole host of skills – social skills, the ability to listen and concentrate, language processing, talking and communicating. Then there’s taking care of yourself physically, eating the right things at the right time and being able to organise yourself for different classes/lessons.
Even writing, which can seem like second nature to most of us, requires so many individual skills for someone in the early learning stages…
- the ability to hold a pen or a pencil
- how to form the shape of the letter
- what the letter represents
- how it fits with other letters to spell a word
- how words fit together to make up a sentence
So it’s not surprising that going to school can send some children’s stress levels sky high, in turn affecting relationships at home. The tasks involved in the journey from bed to breakfast to school and from school to home/activity, mealtime and bed can provide various opportunities for stand-offs throughout the day for children who find school difficult.
Top tips for helping ease back into the school term…
- the all important routine, keeping things predictable and following the same format to get ready for school and for afterschool activities and homework
- pay attention to basic physical needs like sleep and diet – it’s amazing the impact of being tired and low energy levels
- time healthy snacks for the return from school so that energy dips don’t affect homework/activity time
- ask your child about school, notice things and offer help if you think it’s needed. It’s important to be aware of any specific things that might be troubling your child – bullying, learning difficulties etc and act to find solutions or support early on
- use calenders and planners to map out the week so that kids know where they are going and when – visual cues are helpful especially if things can change from week to week – I like the Organised Mum weekly planner (you can win one by entering the prize draw below).
None of these tips are rocket science but they can make the transition from holidays to school a bit easier. I’d love to hear your tips for making term time easier…
To win a fab weekly planner leave a comment or email info@adoptresources.co.uk.