One of the children has been having a hard time regulating her emotions. She breaks down into tears and screams when upset or frustrated. When she screams and cries I remind her to use her words and I ask her what happened. When I am successful at helping her communicate with her friends I feel happy and satisfied. When I am not successful, though, I feel unsure of what to do next. For example, at cleanup time she repeatedly ignored Uncle Jon’s messages to clean up and continued to play with the train tracks and the trains. I went up to her and asked her, “What was Uncle Jon’s message?” She ignored me and kept playing. Uncle Jon repeated the message and she continued to play. I asked her, “Did Uncle Jon say to cleanup or play? She responded with, “Play.” I said, “No, he said to cleanup.” Another friend who was also playing with the tracks began helping to clean up. E. finally put two pieces of track away. When the friend pushed the bucket under the table E. began crying because she wanted to push it under the table. I said, …show more content…
My goals for this two week period were to help children play together, to position myself away from the other teacher in order to provide better coverage while on the deck and in the classroom, and to be more aware of when children are speaking to me in order to model language through parallel speak or open-ended questions. I tried my best to help the children play together. I used to tell the children if they aren’t listening to their friends to play someplace else. Now I stay close by to help them play next to or with their friends cooperatively. I am also positioning myself a distance away from the other teachers in order to provide better coverage for the children. I am still working on using open-ended questions to extend children’s language. Mostly I have practiced parallel language modeling, repeating what the child said back to them. I am also trying to use the word “Yes.” instead of