FACILITATING INDEPENDENCE
Do you ever get to the classroom door and realize that you’ve carried a backpack, lunchbox, and jacket while your child has skipped into the classroom empty-handed? To facilitate independence in young children, we must ensure they are responsible for their belongings. It sometimes seems easier to be the one in charge of carrying everything. Still, in the long run, it becomes a burden.
It is essential to have a routine when leaving for school and returning home. A checklist by the door can be a helpful tool. Have the child look over the list (use pictures for younger children) to see if they need (ex: shoes, lunch, backpack). When you come through the door after school, expect that children will put their shoes and backpack in a specific place and take their lunch box to the kitchen.
In my PreK/K classroom, the children were seen as competent in managing daily tasks independently. The children knew they were responsible for their belongings and often alerted them to items on the cubby area floor. You would not believe the amount of lost and found objects that sit unclaimed in a typical preschool and elementary school. We never had articles in the lost and found. Before returning to the classroom after recess, we checked to ensure that everything we had on our bodies when we headed outside was still on our bodies when we came inside.
During lunch and snack times, the children knew that they needed to attempt to open food containers independently. If they couldn’t open it, they needed to ask at least two friends before I would help them. Being self-sufficient and independent at lunchtime is necessary, especially when children move to larger school environments. When there are sixty children in a school cafeteria and two adults, there is no possible way for the teachers to open containers for every child. When purchasing new lunch containers, have your child test them out to see if they can open and close them before heading to the checkout counter. The cutest containers are often the most difficult to open/close.
When we returned from our weekly trips to the creek, the children were often cold, wet, and tired. When we entered the classroom, the first thing they did was grab their extra clothes bin and line up in the bathroom. The process of changing would have been faster if I had helped everyone. Taking off wet clothing is very frustrating, especially when you’re trapped in inside-out tights stuck in your pants leg. Each week, working through the process helped the children learn strategies to make the process smoother.
We cleaned up the classroom five minutes earlier than usual during the winter months to ensure the children had enough time to independently put on their coats, hats, and gloves. While I was happy to assist when necessary, I expected each child tried to zip their coat before I helped them. Although they would have much preferred me to do it for them, I was not willing to rob them of this skill. One of the children told me that they were good at putting on their gloves now because I taught them how and then they corrected that phrase and said, “because you made me do it by myself every day!” The best way to learn is by doing!
