Facilitating the holistic development of children

In topic one, we discussed how to support a child for them to feel a sense of belonging, which should, in turn, also support the child's identity and self-concept. These are areas that support the emotional, but also social development of a child.

Consider the challenges of not knowing or being comfortable with who you are and how this would impact your interactions with the world and the people in it. Would you feel excluded, unwelcome and like you do not belong? 

Children need to have opportunities to take pride in themselves, where they come from, and their general uniqueness as human beings, thus informing on their self-esteem, self-pride and ultimately, how they reach their full potential.

Positive early attachments and interactions with the social world can support children from a very early on in the child’s life. The experiences they observe around them are also significant. For example, are they welcomed into the community, does their parent experience racism or community exclusion at any time or do they feel confident and safe in their world? Intergenerational transference can occur through the child when their parent(s) has experienced extreme adversity socially, which impacts them emotionally.

A service can be a place where the family can feel safe, comfortable, welcomed and like they belong.

Individual reflective activity

Close your eyes and think of a place you feel most welcome, comfortable and completely as if you can be yourself. What does it look like, feel like, who is there and what is it about that place that makes you feel that way? Now think about how we could provide this for children.

Consider the questions that children are beginning to ask themselves, such as:

• Who am I?
• What makes up me?
• What is important to me?
• What do I like and dislike?
• What makes me happy, sad, scared and laugh?
• Where have I been? 
• What are my experiences? 
• Who do I know?
• How am I different? 
• How am I the same?
• What is unique about me?
• What am I interested in?

As educators, consider how we could support children to share and continue to experience such information with the service and other children. How can they feel a sense of belonging through this, though being ‘known’ and ‘understood?’

Experiences and environments for identity, health and positive self-image

Find out information about the child. Learn about their family, culture and experiences and consider how to implement this into the curriculum and the service. How are they represented?

Ideas may include:

• Consider the questions you might ask the children after reading this to further explore and embrace diversity. How could this engage a positive sense of identity and self-esteem?
• Have familiar food. Perhaps the family can share recipes.
• Create family trees and have photos of each child’s family within the room.
• Explore physical differences and similarities with respect, interest and pride, thus supporting a positive self-image.
• Explore and learn about the human body and how amazing bodies are. They enable us to do so much!
• Explore the physiology and autonomy of the body, learn about the small things we often do not notice, such as eyelashes, ‘what are they for?’ ‘How does our heart work?’ ‘How can we see or hear?’ Most of these areas explore what is inside, which is ‘typically’ the same as each other. When children understand their body, they are more likely to explore its potential, making connections to physical activity, fitness and overall health and well-being. Promote this learning and engagement in the program and begin learning for life about their bodies.

Watch

Storytime is a great way for educators and children to learn and share aspects of their culture and identity with each other. Watch the stories being told and reflect on how this benefits children's emotional and social well-being.

Mem Fox Book Reading – Possum Magic, Whoever You Are, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes 11:07 minutes

Too Many Tamales read-aloud 7:09 minutes

The Colours of us Read Aloud! 4:15 minutes

The day the crayons quit – Books Alive! Read Aloud book for children 7:22 minutes

The Rainbow Serpent 2:49 minutes

Supporting ‘my emotions’

Educators must always remember that children are still developing emotional expression and regulation. Childhood is a time to learn how to comprehend, embrace and manage emotions.

Feelings and emotions must be acknowledged, as all emotions are relevant to the person. When we learn about our emotions, we can usually learn to understand the emotions and needs of others, developing such skills as empathy, care and compassion.

While children are learning about emotions, they are egocentric, which means they do not understand the needs of others. This skill has not been developed yet, and they only understand their own needs. When young children cannot share or take an object from another child, it is because they are meeting their own needs but cannot yet empathise with the other child's needs. Most children will learn to manage their own emotions over time but require adults who display patience, understanding, support and comfort while they are still learning. Even as adults, we need others to understand when we feel a certain way. We do not need others to judge our emotions and ask us to ‘stop’ the emotion; this is not how the body and brain work.

Talk about emotions

For children to learn to recognise their own feelings and those of others, it is important to point out when we see them. It is also important to point out what is called ‘empathetic reflections;’ this is when an adult observes what the child may be feeling and makes statements such as ‘I can see you are happy that lunch is here’ or ‘I can see that it makes you feel mad when someone takes your toy.’ It is great to share stories about what effect your emotions (within appropriateness) have on you, such as when you possibly say, ‘I feel grumpy when I get tired.’ You even share emotional strategies you might have, such as ‘when I get tired and grumpy, I like to find a quiet spot and read a book.’

Children can explore emotions spontaneously or within directive intentional teaching moments, exploring such questions as:

‘What does your angry/happy/scared face look like?’

‘Can we make a sad/happy/angry playdough person? I wonder what it might look like.’

‘What makes you feel calm/happy/better?’

Each morning you might have conversations about how each child is feeling, perhaps providing some images to help explain their feelings until they are familiar.

You may like to sing a good morning song, such as this: 

Good morning to you, Good morning to you, Good morning everybody, Good morning to you, How do you feel today? Children shout their feeling How do you feel today? Children shout their feelings Good morning, everybody. You’re all welcome today! Or the classic if you’re happy/ sad/tired, and you know it.

Watch

There are many great children’s books and songs that explore feeling too, such as:

The way I feel series

 

In My Heart: A Book of Feelings

How Are You Feeling Today?

When I’m Feeling Happy by Trace Moroney

Have strategies to support emotions

Allowing children to learn strategies to help soothe themselves is important, and each child (just as adults do) may have their own strategy that works for them and perhaps not others. As a part of emotional development, children can also learn what affects their emotions or settles them as necessary. For example, they could say phrases such as ‘I just need to have some quiet time and read a book,’ ‘I need to go for a jump on the trampoline,’ ‘I need to take 3 deep breaths,’ ‘I need to find the right words.’ A part of supporting children's mental health is finding strategies to help their emotions from a young age, as this can have positive lifelong effects on the child's emotional development and long-term mental health.

Emotional development has major impacts on the formation of the rest of the development, including creating and maintaining friendships and becoming resilient in challenging situations.

Educators should implement the following:

• Consistent and realistic expectations and limits. These should be discussed frequently with alternate solutions to challenges 
• Age-appropriate support strategies
• Age-appropriate self-care strategies
• Quiet, solitary spaces for children to reregulate
• Teaching children to recognise their own emotions and those of others and help to support others in need
• Understanding and pre-empting the emotional triggers of each child
• Empathetic solutions, thus allowing children ‘to feel’ and not repress emotions
• Providing a calm and engaging program that meets the interests and needs of the children
• Discussing emotions honestly, openly and as a natural human reaction to moments of feelings
• Opportunities for children to discuss ethical and moral issues, areas they see as unfair or unjust within their lives or the lives of others

Example

View these lectures on understanding the emotions of children, how they discover further, what it must be like to be in the shoes of a child and the connection to mental health

There are many great children’s books and songs that explore feeling too, such as:

Understanding your child’s emotions: A developmental approach

How to raise emotionally intelligent children

Emotional development has major impacts on the formation of the rest of the development, including creating and maintaining friendships and becoming resilient in challenging situations.

We have discussed the importance of a positive self-image and the connection to the health and well-being of the child.

Healthy children are made up of a combination of what is happening inside and outside their bodies. When educators support children's physical health and fitness, they explore their bodies and environments and support their minds.

Young children need practice and opportunities to accomplish and build on strength, coordination, and balance and to master physical activities that ultimately lead to physical life skills, physical capacity, capability and lifelong health.

Educators can make connections to the impacts inside the body (the heart, the lungs, the muscles) and the connection to our emotions and mental health (pumping of blood, endorphins and adrenaline), which help us feel good on the inside as well as the outside.

Recent research informs that children spend one-third of their day on screens, and other research suggests that children spend more time on screens than at school. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS, 2015) stated that children spend 30% of their time awake on screens. The need to encourage children to build a love of physical activity may stop them from forming various illnesses, diseases and the development of obesity and the connected mental illnesses that accompany sedentary over excess.

Blair et al. (1989) proposed a model for the health consequences of missing childhood physical activity, stating three main benefits of adequate childhood physical activity:

1. The direct improvement of childhood health status and quality of life.
2. The direct improvement of adult health status by, for example, delaying the onset of chronic disease in adulthood.
3. An increased likelihood of maintaining adequate activity into adulthood, thus indirectly enhancing adult health status.

Sedentary behaviours can also minimise the fundamental opportunities for learning, play, activity, social interactions and relationship-building necessary for life. These life skills help children to understand the behaviours and emotions of others, manage and regulate their own emotions, understand appropriate values and morals of society, develop language and social skills, strengthen and develop their physical bodies and the key cognitive understandings they need to navigate life.

What is STEAM?  Some will remember that STEAM used to be STEM, and in some domains, it still is. STEAM is an acronym for  Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics.

These concepts used to be addressed individually, but it had become evident that these concepts are so heavily intertwined that when completing a science activity, it would also include math or technology, or all of the above, so the interconnection of STEAM began. These concepts have been used in school for years to use interactive exploration and investigation to learn about science, technology, engineering, math and the arts. The disciplines support the creation of critical thinking, science literacy and innovation.

STEAM engages children to question, question themselves and even question the question, ‘Why is it important to find the answer to this and what makes it necessary for investigation and research?’ just as researchers around the world do.

Supporting STEAM may be evident by:

• Investigating everyday observations or interests
• Creating surveys or questions for others
• Data collection
• Questioning why we do things or why they occur
• Hypothesising questions such as ‘what will happen if I add this oil to the water?’
• Comparing/sorting/classifying: ‘if I put all these stones together, will it be taller than the tree?’
• Basic coding: ‘two steps towards the tree, three hops forward, two rolls backward;’ creating a logical sequence to get a result or a script for behaviour or instruction.

Watch

Watch Early Childhood Education STEAM (4:18 minutes) to learn how to implement the STEAM curriculum.

Watch Science and STEM Exploration Centres to Empower and Inspire Young Children (9:47 minutes) to see examples of STEM.

Exposure to communication in any form from a young age is vital to the growth of language and literacy skills. It is important to understand that letters and sounds come together to make words, and in a particular order, they make meaning. Early literacy must be enjoyable for children and create a love of learning. Once they begin high concepts such as self-led reading and writing (practised and learnt skills, not innate), forming a positive relationship with language and literacy is essential as this promotes further understanding of these skills and enjoyment.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in the ‘Australia’s children report’ (2020), it was reported that around 95% of year 5 students achieved at or above the minimum standard for reading skills.

Several factors affect successful educational outcomes during the school years, including:

• A child’s home environment, such as if books are available at home and if parents read aloud to their children. Children whose parents read to them every day at 2–3 years old had, on average, higher year 3 NAPLAN reading scores than children whose parents read to them less frequently, according to Yu & Daraganova (2015).
• Attending preschool programs has also been found to be positively associated with year 3 NAPLAN results

Literacy-rich and culturally diverse environments are paramount for the exposure children need to give them such learning opportunities relating to literacy skills. This means having an environment inclusive of the following:

• Ongoing developmentally appropriate communication. Verbal labelling of items (‘bottle’), discussions, stories, rhymes and action dances
• Having a range of culturally diverse images and prints available. Having books and written text available to children (this will include locker names, bed tags, and item labels with their contents).
• Supported emergent literacy stations and creative outlets for the opportunity to write ‘representation symbols’ that later lead to letters and words
• Talk about letters often and relate to objects with their phonetic connections, e.g., ‘this is a Tiger, ‘T’ is for tiger, t, t, T is for tiger.’

Establishing an understanding of literacy, words, sounds, and letters is a concept that takes time. Through repetition of modelled communication, experience and opportunity for practice, children learn many systems required for communicating and interacting with others.

Private or self-speech support children’s rehearsal of language and help them to problem-solve at the same time. For babies, language and communication start with different sounds, cooing, crying and non-verbal communication such as eye contact, smiling and making noises ‘at’ others.

Children begin to understand that words are symbols with mutual understanding with the brain tailored to expect language to develop. Language develops in typical patterns culturally all over the world, including babbling (extended repetition of specific syllables), sing-song patterns of experienced language, recognition of words (especially basic repeated words experienced) and then the child will eventually repeat common words such as ‘mum.’ By around 12 months, children will use particular single words to have needs met, common words or favourites, e.g., dog. They may also begin to place two words together, such as ‘mum up’ anywhere from 12-21 months. By 13-18 months, children will have a vocabulary of about 50 words, and at around 18 months, will learn three or more words a day. By around the age of two, children speak in multiword sentences such as ‘I’m going home now.’

Watch

Watch A window to the world: Promoting early language and literacy development (5:12 minutes) to learn how to support language and literacy.

Watch Why we all need to start reading aloud to our kids (11:13 minutes) to see how to support language and literacy.

Supporting the development of language

To support language development, educators can:

• Use age-appropriate language around children, with children and labelling objects for children.
• Use actions or cues with words helps to match understanding, e.g., ‘clap, clap, clap’ whilst engaging in the action of clapping.
• Use clear, concise and correct language for children and allowing them to observe how your mouth moves to make the sounds can help them mimic the behaviour.
• Use songs and stories to share language. These are often repetitive for children of this age and have a rhythm or melody to them, which helps them to remember and create a flow of the words, images, items or visual cues, helping them make meaning of the words spoken. Ask questions about what they see, what happened, who the characters are, how they felt, what the moral of the story is or what it was about. Also, consider intrigue and facilitate questions such as ‘I wonder what will happen next?’ or ‘What will they do?’
• Take genuine interest and joy in children’s attempts to communicate and support the extension accordingly. For example, if a child points at a fish and says, ‘fish, fish!’ perhaps reply with ‘yes, the fish is in the bowl. Swim fish, swim!’
• Encourage and ask children questions, hypothesise, investigate and encourage curiosity with language. Ask questions such as ‘How did that happen? Why did that happen? How do we make it longer/ brighter/ bigger?’ 
• Support further extension of vocabulary through everyday play and interactions. Ask questions such as ‘I wonder what the ant is doing, hmmm, shall we investigate? Let’s find out more.’ Explaining what the word means helps them make connections while repeating it in similar circumstances helps the children retain it.
• Incorporate a range of play to encourage the use of words and comprehension of words, including dramatic play, creative play, building and construction and project work.
• The use of active games can often help to sort words with actions by incorporating body knowledge and awareness. For example, playing hopscotch, doing yoga, etc.
• Tell stories and encourage children to retell stories, such as ‘what did you do on the weekend? Have you ever been to a farm? Tell me about it. Was there something funny that happened today?’ Encourage children to be curious about each other and ask them questions such as ‘I wonder...’ Ask statement questions when viewing a child’s artwork, for example, and ask questions such as ‘I wonder what would happen if that person did not catch the ball?’ or while reading a story, ask ‘I wonder if they put sunscreen on when they went to the beach?’
• Encourage children to use communication to have their needs met and feel understood. Give them examples of vocabulary and ways to express themselves where needed. Supporting their ability to communicate regarding their well-being is required for emotional development in life. Encouraging this sharing also supports the concept that talking about your feelings is positive and helpful.
• Assist children’s understanding and use non-verbal communication through stories, songs, games, conversations and activities.

Develop rapport by asking open-ended questions about non-threatening or difficult subjects and talking in simple language. Ask children to discuss their interests and engage them by using their topic/s of interest in stories, songs, and games.

Providing opportunities for children to investigate ethical issues relevant to their lives and communities helps them understand life and encourages them to think critically about society and their actions. By exploring ethical issues relevant to their lives, children gain valuable context about current events, social problems, and global concerns that help them build perspective and provide them with the tools they need for making informed decisions. Additionally, this approach gives children access to different perspectives on these topics, which can open up opportunities for creative problem-solving.

Provide opportunities for children to investigate ethical issues relevant to their lives and communities by asking questions. Is it fair to keep all of the toys to ourselves? How would you feel if you weren’t allowed to play?