TEACH WORDS FOR FEELINGS
RELATIONAL APPROACHES TO PRE-K BEHAVIOR
For pre-k, k teachers and day care providers
Georgia Sassen, Ph. D, Presenter
Preschoolers are just learning to play together. They are just learning how to express their wishes to each other. Are you surprised to know that they can identify feelings and learn to express these to each other? They can. And this helps them learn to cooperate and do well in the classroom.
This interactive workshop provides pre-K and K workers with tools for:
- Building a relational environment: “teach words for feelings”
Children can build the skill of working well together if we help them learn the words for feelings. Then “use your words” also means “tell your friend how you feel”. This builds conflict resolution skills and friendships.
- Understanding your own behavior
Triggers, feelings and behavior (yours)
• What is a trigger?
• Triggers lead to feelings
• Feelings lead to behavior
• What to do when these feelings arise: edit the behavior
• When children's feelings are triggered:
• How to REDIRECT this process to where you want it to go.
- Understanding these interactions in RELATIONAL terms
• Some key relational terms:
• Connection
• Disconnection
• Moving from Disconnection to Connection
• Specific things to do and say to reestablish Connection with a child in your class.
- Relational Mapping
• Who are the children you thought of in today's class?
• Learning to see them in the context of relationships.
• Using Relational Mapping to understand these children.
• Communicating with colleagues by using relational maps.
Objectives:
Participants will:
• Learn to foster children's abilities to communicate about feelings
• Understand how their own feelings drive their behavior towards children
• Learn to edit this behavior: what to keep and what to stop
• Learn how to make their class more connected
• Learn to recover from disconnections and conflict
• Experiment with visual tools for understanding their class
• Communicate better with colleagues by using these tools
