Last year, in my practical placement in Greece, I had to visit the kindergarten 8 times during the whole year. My subject, I had to teach children, was “Emotions”. Till the end of my visits, the children should:
· learn the 6 basic emotions they deal with every day (fear, joy, sadness, anger, shyness and surprisal)
· be able to recognize and discriminate them
· learn to respect others’ feelings
· and the most hard, how to express them for themselves…
My class was consisted of many different types of children but the biggest minority, was a group of 4 kids from Albania. Two of them, couldn’t speak Greek at all and the other two could speak only a little. I knew that the subject we were tasked, was a very difficult one because even the adults are not always able to discriminate and express our feelings…
During my teach, I could experience that when I was reading a story in Greek, those 4 children were indifferent about that and they didn’t pay attention. Hopefully, I had predicted about that and I had designed a few activities that could involve them betting on their ability to understand me through images and express themselves through the body language. I made 6 cards, 2 two big dices (with 6 feelings and 6 verbs to match), a playing wheel and two papier colle (we had to create all together) that should imprint the extreme expressions of joy and sadness made by happy and sad images.
When we deal with these activities, accompanied by music, I noticed that every kid (including these 4) could understand me without giving so many explanations. They only had to see me pointing some things, announcing some rules and then… daraaa!!! I could see my “wronged” quadruplet participating equally and having the exact fun with the rest kids. I realized deep to the bone that even though sometimes it’s hard for people to communicate, with a good effort we can find a way to achieve it. I knew that these children, had their own feeling as well and the fact that they don’t speak the vulgar tongue, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t spend time trying to understand their mental world. In the end of my practical placement I summarized some things:
· It’s a given that we all have hundreds of feelings possessing us all the time even though it may not be always visible
· Children have more feelings and less ways to express them than us
· When someone is sad, angry, stubborn or introvert, this may be because he hasn’t found the right ways to express his feelings and not because he is spoiled or acrid
· “Touching” a kid’s soul by letting you see a part of it, is the noblest things I can have experience in my profession!!!
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