11 Questions that will make your child happier

I love these as a mom and a teacher they are great reminders on how to frame questions and conversations with children. These were taken from this article.

1. What was your favorite part of today?

This is a good question to ask at bedtime, to help your child feel content and happy before sleep. It also instills a habit of focusing on the best thing that happened in any given day rather than the worst. If you make this part of your bedtime routine, it will become second nature.

2. What are you grateful for?

This is a good question for the dinner table. Every family member can take a turn saying what he or she is grateful for that day. There is a strong correlation betweenhappiness and gratitude, so this one is very powerful.

3. What are you going to do about that?

When a child comes to you with a problem, ask this question in a warm and curious tone. Don't just jump in and solve their problem; how does that help them in the long run? At least give them a chance to work it out on their own, and give them the gift of your confidence in them, which is evident by this question that implies that they can think of solutions to their own issues. If your child says "I don't know," you can say, "I am not sure either, let's try to figure it out together." Happy people are people who think of problems as surmountable, and think of themselves as effective problem solvers.

4. How did that make you feel?

At the risk of sounding shrink-y, an essential part of happiness is being able to notice and express your own emotions. If you can verbalize what you're feeling, you can make sense of it, you can process it, and you can obtain support from others. This is a great question to ask when your child comes to you with something "bad" that happened, instead of either dismissing it ("that wasn't that bad") or fixing it ("let mommy get you some ice!"). It trains your child to be aware of his feelings, and to use that information effectively.

5. What do you think he/she feels?

In any situation, you can cultivate empathy by asking your child to wonder about what someone else feels. Empathy will make your child a happier person; he or she will have stronger interpersonal relationships, feel better about himself for thinking of (and then, often, helping) others, and derive more meaning from life.

6.  How can we look on the bright side?

In any situation, you can teach your child that there are positives. With preteens or teenagers, this question may be way too corny, but little kids will like it. You can also teach them the expression "making lemonade out of a lemon" and ask them how you can make lemonade out of a bad situation, like, "You fell and hurt yourself, so that's a lemon, but you got a Tinkerbell bandaid, and that's lemonade! Now you tell Mommy one."

7. What part of that can we learn more about?

In any TV show, book, trip outside the house, basically any situation at all, there is something to learn more about. And look at you, Super Parent, you already have your smartphone at the ready!  So this time use it for teaching your child that life is full of learning opportunities.  Happy people are people who are curious and always learning.  So when you watch TV and someone says "Bonjour," you can look up pictures of France or a YouTube song sung in French. When your child realizes that this question means that you're going to whip out your phone and show them something new and special, they will ask it to you all the time. And that's how you end up looking at pictures of real estate in Nebraska with your 4-year-old. Don't ask.

8. What do you want to do on the weekend?

Research shows that anticipation of positive experiences brings more happiness than the experiences themselves. Once your child is old enough to realize that tomorrow is not today, start instilling a habit of positive anticipation of small pleasures. A child who is excited all week to get frozen yogurt on the weekend is a happy child, just as an adult who plans a vacation six months in advance is happier during those six months.

9. What can we do to help/to make someone happy?

Bringing your child along to visit a sick relative, or someone recovering from surgery, or to volunteer at a soup kitchen is a wonderful gift that you can give to your child. Your child will feel even more proud of his behavior if he is the one to think up the nice thing that can be done (e.g., baking cookies to deliver, drawing a card). Research shows that giving even releases oxytocin and endorphins, so it's like a high that your child can become addicted to. Also, involve your child in your charitable activities, as giving charity is a form of altruism that is also linked directly to happiness (and just to being a good person, which you also want for your child).

Incorporate a spirit of generosity into your child's daily life. Whenever you're out, buy something little for someone else.  When you color, make a picture for someone else. Giving things to others makes people happier than buying things for themselves, and enriches interpersonal relationships.

10. What do you want to do outside today?

Getting outside and engaging in physical activities alongside your child is a wonderful way to get him or her in the habit of not just sitting around. Exercise releases endorphins and is as effective at treating depression as SSRI's. And the most powerful way that you can teach your child about exercise is to do it yourself. Children whose mothers exercise are more likely to exercise themselves. And sunlight can also help boost mood and regulate circadian rhythms, which means better sleep for your kids, which makes everyone happier.

11. When do you feel happiest?

If you direct your children's attention to the experiences that they most enjoy, they will start to realize that they can choose to proactively increase their time spent in activities that make them feel best about themselves.  According to researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "flow" is the state where people find an activity so enjoyable and rewarding that they become completely immersed in it, losing all sense of time and feeling completely in the moment. If your child is lucky enough to have found an activity that makes him feel a sense of "flow," it is helpful for you to point this out and allow your child enough time to attain this state. Note: for many kids this is video gaming, which is actually fine, since a great deal of research points to many psychological benefits of gaming (and anecdotally, I know many people who met their spouses while gaming, and gaming actually brings spouses closer if both participate!). The best case scenario is for your child to find a career that puts him into "flow," since then, as the saying goes, he will never "work" a day in his life.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samantha-rodman-phd/11-questions-that-will-make-your-child-happier_b_6401788.html

Classroom Behaviour Activity - 'Bug' Chart

Good way to launch a conversation about classroom behaviors ... http://www.pinterest.com/pin/2251868538310213/

Report Cards and Assessment

This post  goes through some "sticky situations" that seem to focus on the USA system. Still, the question has to be asked, what should you do if you 're asked to change a grade?

This opens up a greater discussion, for me, about the ways we use assessment and if grades are even neccessary as the "most important reporting of assessment"

Having recenly done my year end report cards for my Grade 8s I know how the various assessment methods can be used.

I have a lot of students and sometimes parents, ask me throughout the year about why they got this grade or that. I enjoy those conversations. It shows interest and opens up discussions about overall learning, not just "the grade"

I often use rubrics for projects, clearly laid out clear criteria for my students. They always know exactly what I am looking for when marking and how they will be assessed. This helps minimize "surprises" and opens up conversations about their learning.

I had a student come and ask if they could do "extra projects" to increase their grade (a week before report cards) I had that "difficult conversation" about where they needed to work on improvements and it was not their ability to do extra projects. It was a very honest conversation and the student was thankful for the feedback. Their parent even contacted me to follow up and thank me for the specific feedback to improve.

I think it is important to have those coversations with students so the expectations are clear and they really know where they are at and why.

Of course if we moved away from letter grades, I wonder how that may change the whole process?

I recently read this post:

Letter Grades No Longer Make the Grade

which is something I am very curious to explore further. Last year our district has job action and part of that was no report cards. Assessment still happened, communication with parents seemed to be even more frequent and overall I think the feedback was more productive than a letter on a piece of paper.

One of the parents of a student I taught a few years ago came back to me this year and told me they appreciated two years ago when I taught their son, emphasizing the work habits over the letter grade. They had, like many parents, always believed their son must get straight A's all the time (which he usually did) but what I pointed out, was that although she was getting very high letter grades, his work habits marks were S's and N's and that that was an area he could work on improving.

Report Cards are confusing, as a parent, reading report cards was always confusing. Of course you look right to the letter grade, the snapshot of your childs learning. But, the work habits, the words chosen inthe comments, those are important too! As a parent and as a teacher, I think ongoing assessment and communication with the student and teacher and parent is far more important than a piece of paper.

 

THOUGHTS?

This reminds me of a post last year about giving ZERO on assignments... oh the discussions continue...