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We often work on interest, we look for resources, skills, tools, coaching, and so on. What about self and social skills? If we want these to be developed, we need to work on them consciously like any other skill.it’s not enough to say “I want to work on my emotions or relationship or my weaknesses or strengths”. When you are planning, you can also plan for the HOW. How brings the specific action plan to develop and reflect brings awareness and self-assessment.Like last week we worked on RATING as a tool to assess our work, we can also use different tools to become aware and reflect on self and social skills.
A NOTE for PARENTS –If possible re-visit the planning of a self-social bucket as a family. Do add the tools to work on this aspect of life. Do share the tools you are exploring for the development of these skills. Parents of younger kids can work on exposure.
SOME EXAMPLES of EXPOSURE
- Build these into day to day activities – for example – let the child choose to prepare the quantity of the meals – makes the child responsible and independent.
- Create special occasions for children to experience these success characteristics – for example, let your four years old personally call all her (and your) friends for her birthday. Maybe she will need more calls, more of your time may goof up at someplace – but what better way to learn people and communication skills.
SOME TIPS for all AGES
- EXPERIENTIAL – lead to children “experiencing” the objective – eg: children play a modified version of ‘musical chairs’ to experience disappointment and how they handle it.
- OPEN – Each child can work at his or her level – since children are at different levels of skills, pace, and interests openness ensures – No ‘one right’ answer – hence it takes children beyond their current ability and perceptions. Eg: given an ending, each child thinking/ writing his own version of how this story happened.
- GROUP based – Each activity uses group dynamics so that each child learns ‘more’ because of the group. Eg: Together organizing an event, with each child sharing different responsibilities.
- SELF EVALUATED – Not only the child does evaluate himself but also does it with reference to himself. Hence the effort becomes “Progress oriented” instead of Performance (result) driven. For eg: The child uses a tool called “confidence meter” to calibrate her confidence levels, before, during, and after the activity.