Being Friendly Towards The Students - Yay or Nay? (Part 2)

We’ve talked about the meaning of being a real teacher and why we should to be one in the first part (click here). Now in the second part we are going to talk about the ways to profound the affection between the teachers and the students, and the benefits of being friendly towards them.

The first one, we need to be a Good Listener. Everyone want to be heard, whether it’s about the sadness or the happiness. Once a time, try to spare our time to listen to them. You’ll get surprised and cannot believe, by sparing 5 to 10 minutes of our time for them can increase the teacher-student relationship.

The second one, Talk to Them. we can just ask them about smallest things, like “how’s your day”, “have you eaten?”, ‘what did you just learn” and many more. In my school, i always try to get close to all of my students in every grade start from kindergarten to high school. Not just inside the class, we often have a conversation in our free time and sometimes it happens spontaniously. We meet by accident or they come to see me by purpose. We rarely have a heavy conversation, what we do just an easy chit chat or make a joke. 

The Third one is Appreciate Them. we need to aprreciate whatever they do, even it seems nothing for others, but as the teachers it should be a great thing. Every kid is different, they came from different background, different skills, and different behavior. In looking for their abillity, teachers need to be fair. Try to decrease our negative thoughts over them. There might a lot of naughty kids, but we should stop looking at their black side, we need to spot their white dots and bring it up to the surface so they will gain more confident and make them improve their skills.

Gwen Dewar, Ph.D said in Student-teacherrelationships:

Supportive student-teacher relationships are more than a charming social perk. Studies suggest they help kids adapt, learn, and achieve

Build Fine Motor Skills - Early Childhood Coloring Activity

Early childhood, start from 1 to 3 years old is called as the golden age which their cognitive, emotion, and social development improve in the fastest and greatest ways. In this period, the kids must be taught a lot of things in order to build their skills up especially for the motor skills. Motor skills are the ways of the body to improve the performance to be more complex, and it will continue for the entire life. The motor skills is divided into two classifications, there are Gross motor skills and fine motor skills.

Gross motor skills are the skills that require the large muscles movements, involve the entire body to engage the physical activities such as running, swimming, kicking, etc. Fine motor skills are those which require the small muscles, the coordination between the body muscles and the eyes. It can be trained in many ways such as moving an object, doodling, set the blocks, writing, etc. And with the combination of both skills, the children developments will be increase maximally. 

One of the fun ways to stimulate the fine motor skills is coloring activity.

Who doesn’t like coloring? Children really love this activity, they can set their imaginations free through the colors. They will be trained to distinguish colors, mix them together and create the new one. And soon or later, these abilities will help them to make many art creations along to their developmental age.

Now i will give an example of the coloring activity. Here i got my own nephew as the ‘experimental’ object. His name is Rafa, and he is 19 months old. He is a very active toddler and has a lot of energy. And whenever the energy burst, he will be doing many naughty activities which somehow will disturb us in some ways. That’s why as the adults we must know how to control it and channel the energy to the worthwhile activity.