Archive for the Developing Social Skills Category

Students And Learning Disabilities

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | Permalink

Many children will have a special learning need at some time during their school career and will need to have some extra support and help to access and keep up with the curriculum. Primary schools are set up to cope with children within a wide band of ability and have a responsibility to integrate all children within their local community. The only children who may have to go to a special school are children with serious mental and physical delay or profound physical difficulties.

All schools are required to have a teacher who acts as a Special Education Co-ordinator. This person is in charge of monitoring all youngsters who have any kind of special need that may affect their ability to access the usual curriculum. This could be a learning difficulty in the area of literacy (dyslexia) or numerary (dyscalculia), hearing or visual impairment, emotional and behavioral difficulties, physical disability, or a wide range of medical or neurological conditions.
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Developing Your Child’s Listening Skills At School

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | Permalink

School is a socially interactive environment. Most children have twenty-nine other people to get along with in their class alone, not to mention all the children they come across in the playground. Schools encourage and promote social development as essential to community living.

Children need to learn to respect other children’s needs and feelings and to be able to share and co-operate with others. They must learn to take turns when playing with games and with equipment. It is important for the child to understand that someone else may have a different point of view from themselves and that this is not only acceptable but has to be tolerated.

Children need to develop a real understanding and empathy with other people’s feelings. This involves being aware of their own feelings and being able to describe them so they can articulate their own needs and consequently also be able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Children also have to learn to manage the frustration that comes when people do not do what they want!
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Children Developing Concentration and Attention Skills in Schools

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | Permalink

From the moment children start school, teachers will focus on training them to sit still and listen attentively to their teaching, to stories or to discussions. They will give children a number of planned activities but encourage them to focus for increasing periods of time on a single activity. They will do this making their expectations clear through praise and encouragement, and maybe stickers or stars and positive feedback.

When they start school, many children like to flit from activity to activity, only staying in one place for a minute or two. They are naturally excited by the environment and want a little bit of everything. When reception classes were more an extension of nursery ‘learning through play’ environments, these children had an opportunity to slowly build up their ability to concentrate for longer on a given activity. Now, right from the beginning of schooling, children are expected to sit still for twenty to thirty minutes at a time. Many children, particularly kinaesthetic boys, find this almost impossible.
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How Children Develop Social Skills In School

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 | Permalink

Schools realise the vital importance in the learning process of developing talking and listening skills and therefore they set up opportunities within the school day to allow children to be able to practise and refine their skills. These skills will include the following:

Asking and answering questions

Children need to develop confidence to ask and answer questions within the classroom environment. The best environment allows children the opportunity to enquire and be curious and to seek answers to their questions. Children should feel able to take the risk and ask questions, even if they don’t always get the answer right, and this means creating an environment of trust where it is OK to get it wrong.

Good teachers will make sure that all the children in the class have an opportunity to ask and answer questions on a regular basis as teaching is an interactive experience.
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