0:17 - Pay attention to the way we react
0:50 - Be a positive role models
1:25 - Favorite games for this purpose
2:39 - About Me collage
Hi folks, my name is Harper with Bow-Tiger and you are watching Saturdays With Harper. And the topic for discussion today is character building and self-esteem activities for children.
Now, the first thing we want to think about when we're trying to build our children's self-esteem and build character for them is we want to really pay attention to the way we react to things. When our child's speaking to us, we want to make sure that we are really engaged in their conversation, we're very interested in what they have to say. You can do that with making sure that you use eye contact and making sure that you have something to say back to them, so it's not just a one sided conversation where they don't think that you're interested. That's a big thing. We always want to make sure that we're being super attentive.
Also, in our own lives, we wanna make sure that we're positive role models for our children. We don't want to display anything like being mean to others, not listening to others, not helping others. We wanna make sure that we embrace them and show them how we have to love everyone else and how we should want to help our neighbors. This is a big thing for small children. They look up to us as parents, so let's make sure that we're definitely positive role models so they can build their characters and build their self-esteem for the future.
Now, I wanna talk about a couple of my favorite games for this purpose. One of them can be used in sort of a classroom setting or a group of kids, maybe four, five or more children. What you actually do is you take the children and you set them in a circle, and everybody writes their name down on a piece of paper. Now, we take those pieces of paper and we put them into the middle of the circle and jumble them all up. Then every child gets a piece of paper again, and if they get their own name, they do need to put it back into the pile to make sure they actually receive somebody else's name.
Now, once they get a piece of paper back with someone else's name on it, they write something nice about that person. And then all of those papers, once everybody's done, are folded back up and they're handed to the right. And then the person to the right that receive that, they actually open up the little letter and they read the person's name and they read the nice thing that the other person wrote about them. It's something to help build the character and self-esteem through speaking with a group. And it also makes all of the kids feel really good about themselves because they know that their friends, their neighbors think this of them. So that's an excellent idea to try classroom setting or just within a group of children.
Another awesome thing is an About Me collage and any adults, I'm sure, we've made collages along the way. This About Me collage is just all about your child. What does your child like? What type of sports does he or she like to play? What type of animals do they like? What do they like about themselves? Make a great, big collage and then proudly display that somewhere like your kitchen or living room, somewhere where they can see that you're proud of the way they are, of what they are, and what they're becoming. The encouragement from parents is a huge, huge aspect of self-esteem and character building for younger children.
So just take those things into consideration and if you are watching this blog on YouTube or Facebook, please make sure to check out our blog so you can see more videos like this.
