The Values.
The rhythms of our daily life has benefited our family structure in such a positive way. Through our daily rhythms, life
gives more freedom to everyone in the home. With a rhythm, my children are more relaxed and comfortable, and more secure because they know that the adult they love and trust is guiding the flow of the day. They relax into this security knowing their needs are met and its so phenomenal.
In this daily rhythm, I've included story time in the morning to help center us into our mission as a family unit. I could have filled story time up with any fairy tale story of my choosing but I decided to spend that morning story time focused on the living values created for my children.
There are twelve values that I've centered around this home program to promote self-esteem, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and creative expression. I find these to be skills that will enable children to respond positively to the ever-changing world we live in.
The 12 values are:
- Peace
- Respect
- Love
- Responsibility
- Happiness
- Cooperation
- Honesty
- Humility
- Tolerance
- Simplicity
- Unity
- Freedom
Since we are on the first value, I'll explain the first value of peace in detail. The reflection points about peace are:
Peace is being quiet inside.
Peace is having a good feeling inside.
Peace is when people get along and don't argue or hit
Peace is feeling relaxed and safe
Peace is having positive thoughts about self and others
Peace begins with all of us.
There are four main goals to go along with this peaceful unit. Each goal has its own objectives to teach and display peace for my three littles of different ages ( 4-7). The peaceful unit contains 22 lessons. I've organized our schedule to cover 1 lesson per story time.
Goal #1: To increase the experience of peace.
- To help my littles to increase their ability to concentrate
- To express peace artistically
- To sing a song about peace
- To enable children to enjoy being quiet inside
Goal #2: To increase knowledge about peace
- To imagine a peaceful world
- To play with peace peg dolls, enacting peaceful interactions and role play
- To hear a story about their natural goodness
Goal #3: To build emotional literacy skills regarding their feelings
- To understand we all feel sad and hurt when someone is mean
- To understand that sadness, hurt or being scared can be under anger
- To share and listen to feelings of peace
- To identify through drawing, kind things they can do
- To identify through drawing, what they do and do not like others to do
Goal #4: To build conflict resolution skills
- To verbalize " arms are for helping, not for hurting" through song
- To be able to hear others through a conflict resolution role play with peg dolls
If you have noticed by the objective under each goal, my children and I conduct role playing to learn. Story telling and role playing has been the best way to implement true understanding.
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