On the Coast – Families Issue 100 I June/July 2019 | Page 34

Journey
An early learning
A
s a leadership team at our early
learning centre, we embarked on
an action research project. At
first the topic of emotional intelligence
was broad, looking at the whole of
emotional intelligence and trying to
incorporate areas such as resilience,
empathy, respect, emotions, confidence,
etc. We then decided to narrow it down
to resilience, working out that this would
make the biggest impact leading to the
children going to school.
Once we started to do some research
into the topic including emotional
intelligence, resilience and anti-bullying
we realised just how important the first 5
years are, specifically speaking for
emotional intelligence. In their first 5
year of life a child, 90% of a child’s brain
has already developed (Hunter, 2017).
This means we have a massive role to
play in terms of helping a child develop
their emotional intelligence.
Facts:
ƒ ƒ By the time a baby is born 100 billion
neurons (brain cells) have already
been produced
ƒ ƒ Babies start learning from their birth
ƒ ƒ On average a child’s vocabulary
expands from 55 words at 16 months
to 225 words at 23 months to 573
words at 30 months.
We really focused towards resilience
and emotional intelligence because of
wanting to empower children before they
move from our setting where there is a lot
of support, communication with families
and emotions, to the primary setting
where the expectations and connections
are a lot different. Children are also
expected to be a lot more independent and
in the playground there can be less
teacher intervention in conflict.
Knowing this we then wanted to help
children and we found the best way was
to build their resilience. By children
having a strong resilience it will build on
their confidence in themselves and with
others, give them the power to ‘walk
away’ from conflict, giving them the
confidence to express themselves verbally
“I don’t like that!” as well as knowing
when someone is playing or joking with
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O N T H E C OA S T – FAM ILIES
them and what is hurtful words.
From here we came up with our
action research project question:
In what ways can we as educators
use storybook reading to support
children’s developing emotional
intelligence and resilience?
What is resilience?
From our readings and
understanding, resilience is
closely linked with the circle of security
theory, by building children up, they
have the confidence and sense of self to
go out to the world, returning when they
need to seek comfort, whether this be
physically returning, or simple a smile
from a trusted educator across the room.
“Resilience develops on a continuum
and is not innate. We therefore must
take time to plan and intentionally
teach skills to foster resilience, and
most importantly to be mindful of
our interactions. We should not
underestimate the powerful impact an
early years educator can have upon a
child’s skills in resilience” (Miller 2013)
Where to from here?
To assist educators in helping children
understand and learn resilience we did
some research about the link between
books and resilience. We wanted to go a
little further and found that there was a
strong link between fairy tales and
those traditional morals, not just good
and bad, but deeper morals. The
literature told us that:
“Fairy tales help to teach children an
understanding of right and wrong, not
through direct teaching but through
implication” (The Literacy Classroom,
2017). Fairy tales build children’s
emotional resiliency and capacity to
handle problems. They teach children
how to deal with conflict, and aide
“children in dealing with anxiety they
are, as yet, unable to explain” (The
Literacy Classroom, 2017).
Once we had all the research and a
plan we held a workshop for all the
educators in our
service to deliver
this information.
This was
conducted in a fun and
inclusive way which had all
the educators eager to get on
board and begin the program.
Each room was provided
with a resource pack
containing the book, felt stories,
puppets and masks to allow the
children to engage in building resilience
through storytelling. Each room was able
to adapt this to their needs of the age
group. Books were also adapted from their
original storyline as needed if the
traditional story was a little too
confronting.
Before too long, all age groups were
seeing children connecting with the
story and using the language within
the correct context of their play. Other
things we identified after this program
had been in place for nearly a year was
children;
ƒ ƒ use ‘emotional’ labels to communicate
how they are feeling. For example “I’m
frustrated!”
ƒ ƒ are more confident in expressing their
point of view
ƒ ƒ are better able to self-calm and settle
more effectively and quickly than
previously
ƒ ƒ demonstrate greater empathy for their
peers.
ƒ ƒ respond and react more appropriately
to their peers.
ƒ ƒ are better able to deal with conflict
with less teacher intervention.
ƒ ƒ are more persistent.
Looking to the future….
Our programs continue to develop and be
adapted to the needs and interests of the
children. We have begun to share our
findings with families to create
consistency for the children. We continue
to research new ways of developing and
building children’s resilience and
confidence in conflict resolution.
Article supplied by Jasmine Armstrong, Carlie Chamings, Carolyn Fletcher & Emma Hughes of
Goodstart Early Learning – Tumbi Umbi Phone [phone]