Observing Communication

Communication is all about passing information, it also helps to develop a common understanding between individuals. Communication occurs both verbally and non verbally, but the most important thing about communication is the ability to be “other” oriented. I have learnt that in communicating with children, I have to listen to them most of the time in other to go into their world of imagination.

Recently I observed a little girl narrating to her mother how a butterfly transforms from its cocoon stage to a real butterfly. The 4 year old girl demonstrates this transformation using a play dough that she rolled up to look like a worm and eventually turns into a butterfly. One of the amazing thing about the little girls expose, was how she molded the butterfly in its cocoon stage and also another image of a butterfly that was transformed already.

The little girl was so confident about what she was doing and I could see how delighted the mum was, paying so much attention to her, and from her body gesture you could tell that she was all up for a breath taking expose.

What I notice between this adult and the little girl was that, the adult was so patient with the girl, taking her from one stage of transformation to another, and the unique thing about this was how the girl’s vocabulary has improved as it concerns butterfly. So it got me thinking that as early educators we can make children initiate a discussion based on what they like and at the same time help build their vocabulary in that context, and this process will be an ongoing one as we introduced different topics.

Creating Affirming Environment.

One of our greatest responsibilities as early educators is to be able to identify and create a suitable environment that best represent our wide range of diverse children and families. My idea of an anti-bias environment is on that put into cognizance the needs and requirements of children of children and families under their care.

My family day care will have pictures of different cultures, and ethnicity so that each child and family will feel at home whenever they are in the day care, this will make them relaxed and be part of our day care, by so doing no family will be left out. Our toys, pictures, posters and art works will show the range of different family structures, economic backgrounds and various religion.

A wide variety of families representing various races and ethnicity, performing all types of jobs, making sure that both women and men are represented in the jobs will be used in our picture collection in order to erase stereotypical behavior from the children.

People with disabilities will not be left out. We will make sure that we have posters that shows that both men, women, boys and girls can be physically challenged too. We will also show that they all have families just like every other child. Picture of them working and sharing family fun time will be represented too.

We will like to represent the different skin tone of different races and ethnicity just like Adriana Castillo did but in our own unique way. The different skin tone will be our uniquely made big throw pillows which will help comfort this children at drop of time when they don’t want to leave their parents. Our reasons for doing this is because children that are so attached to their parents will be easily be comforted with things that reminds them of their parents, so I believe this will help.