gentle guidance
GUIDANCE TECHNIQUES
Cognitive development is possible only with healthy emotional and social development. We believe that children, learn with the teachers guidance, appropriate and acceptable behavior patterns. Our school culture is one of cooperation and mutual respect based on a strong sense of community in the classroom.
OUR GOALS ARE:
- to guide children in developing respect for self, others and the environment.
- to help children learn problem solving skills.
- to assist children in practicing responsible decision-making.
- to teach cooperation, collaboration and compassion.
- to encourage and support development of self-confidence, self-control and responsibility.
OUR GUIDANCE METHODS ARE:
- to model appropriate behaviour.
- to provide simple, clear, consistent limits and expectations.
- to focus on the child's behaviour and not on the child.
- to structure the rooms and activities to avoid potential problems.
- to reinforce appropriate behaviour.
- to offer appropriate choices.
- to use natural and logical consequences.
- to teach problem solving strategies.
"They [children] are autonomously capable of making meaning from their daily life experiences through mental acts involving planning, coordination of ideas, and abstraction…. The central act of adults, therefore, is to activate, especially indirectly, the meaning-making competencies of children as a basis of all learning. They must try to capture the right moments, and then find the right approaches, for bringing together, into a fruitful dialogue, their meanings and interpretations with those children."
(Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994), Italian early childhood education specialist. Quoted in The Hundred Languages of Children, ch. 3, by Carolyn Edwards (1993).)