Young Children - March 2008 - (Page 58) rope and make sure nobody breaks those rules; violators who jump out of turn are not invited to play next time. Finally, they need to apply the rules to themselves—for example, a child who wants to join some classmates playing a game but remembers that she needs to finish the book first and stays in the listening center. The good news is that teachers can view a healthy amount of tattling in kindergarten as evidence of children’s growing self-regulation! • Offer children visual and tangible reminders about self-regulation. Learning to regulate one’s own behavior is in many ways similar to learning other competencies, such as literacy or numeracy. For young children, early stages of learning to read or to count involve the use of hands-on activities and manipulatives like magnetic letters or Unifix cubes. Similarly, early stages of learning self-regulation involve the use of visual and tangible reminders that support children’s memory and attention. For example, kindergartners who have trouble remembering to put their name on their papers will become much more attentive when they put on “editor’s eyes”—that is, a pair of eyeglasses with the lenses removed—to remind themselves to check their work before turning it in. For example, an effective way to settle or avoid a fight about turn taking is to give young children a tangible tool—such as choosing the short straw, tossing a coin, or rolling dice—to determine who goes first in playing a board game or who has the next turn on the computer. teach math or phonics, children have to first have the ability to follow rules that are quite abstract and arbitrary. Children acquire and develop this ability during make-believe play, when they learn to follow concrete and simple rules such as not grabbing the stethoscope when pretending to be the patient. Instead of getting rid of blocks and dress-up clothes, kindergarten teachers need to primarily focus on improving the quality of make-believe play, ensuring that children have numerous opportunities to engage in acting out complex pretend scenarios—practicing self-regulation (Bodrova & Leong 2005, 2007). Conclusion Addressing gaps in knowledge and skills alone cannot guarantee success in learning for all children; we must also address the development of self-regulation as the underlying skill that makes learning possible. Kindergarten classrooms present an important opportunity to influence self-regulation in young children. In fact, for many children, school becomes the first and only place where they can learn to regulate themselves. Thus, instruction in selfregulation in the early years deserves the same, if not more, attention as the instruction in academic subjects. References Bialystok, E., & M.M. Martin. 2003. Notation to symbol: Development of a child’s understanding of print. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 86: 223–43. Blair, C. 2002. School readiness: Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobiological conceptualization of children’s functioning at school entry. American Psychologist 57 (2): 111–27. Blair, C., & R.P. Razza. 2007. Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development 78 (2): 647–63. Bodrova, E., & D.J. Leong. 2005. Self-regulation as a key to school readiness: How can early childhood teachers promote this critical competence? In Critical issues in early childhood professional development, eds. M. Zaslow & I. Martinez-Beck, 223–70. Baltimore: Brookes. Bodrova, E., & D.J. Leong. 2007. Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early child hood education. 2nd ed. Columbus, OH: Merrill/ Prentice Hall. Diamond, A., W.S. Barnett, J. Thomas, & S. Munro. 2007. Preschool program improves cognitive control. Science 318 (5855): 1387–88. Rimm-Kaufman, S., R.C. Pianta, & M. Cox. 2001. Teachers’ judgments of problems in the transition to school. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 15: 147–66. • Make play and games important parts of the curriculum. Not only should play and games not be pushed out of the kindergarten classroom to make room for more “academic” learning, they need to be taken very seriously. Kindergartners learn self-regulation best through activities in which children—and not adults—set, negotiate, and follow the rules. These include make-believe play as well as games with rules. Further, to engage in games like the ones many kindergarten teachers use to Copyright © 2008 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at www.journal.naeyc.org/about/permissions.asp. 58 Young Children • March 2008 http://www.journal.naeyc.org/about/permissions.asp
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