Greetings and Welcome!
We have a few new families joining our school this week. Let's welcome:
The Pennington Family (Caterpillar)
The Carter-Yaqub Family (Busy Bee)
The Cegielski Family (Tadpole)
The Pemberton Family (Supersonics x 2)
We also welcome a new staff member, Trish Burton. She comes to us from Columbus Schools and is excited to utilize her education in Early Childhood. In case you did not have the pleasure to meet Kenyetta Pemberton, she joined us last week and brings with her experience and education in Early Childhood. She is most recently from the program on base where her husband served.
This week I want to discuss the concept of perception. I could possibly do a long series on this topic so this week I plan to focus on simply our (the adult) perception of a child's emotions. Many times, we look at the child and try to understand where that child is emotionally. If he is crying, then we try to piece together where that emotion is coming from. Many times, we then transfer what we might have felt in a given situation and then place that feeling on the child. If a child is corrected and he is crying, we might say that the child is afraid....or perhaps, embarrassed....or even, disappointed or angry. However, as adults we need to understand that emotion is not something children have the hang of (even adults struggle) and how an emotion is communicated might be similar in different events and with different emotions. When a student starts to cry at KCA, we do a disservice to the child to assume what that child feels. I challenge the teachers to go back to the basics and recognize that the student feels his/her bucket is dipping. It is then ok to let the child know that he/she can react in a manner to get that emotion out. After that point, we then work to help the child verbalize (through words or actions) what caused this dipping feeling. I like to think of the idea of causation and correlation.....they are not always connected. Having five kiddos, I recognize that certain behaviors might come out of different children for different reasons; not all are created equal. Buckets Dipped are equally important as Buckets Filled. Helping students come to grips with their own feelings is important, because the expression of emotion on one's own terms, then the individual doesn't grow.
Maybe I have overstepped my bounds with these words today, I do believe that our perceptions of a child's emotions are not always as we see it, but need to be recognized as a learning point for the child.
Finally, don't forget that we have picture day coming up September 25th and 26th with LifeTouch. I should have flyers coming this week!
Mitch