Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Responsibility-balancing parents and children

How do you know when to pass on responsibility for something to a child? What is the line between helping, enabling and doing it for them?

Gus will be Star Student for his class the last week of February. On Monday he needs to bring in a poster that is "all about me". Some of the suggestions were favorite food, color, book, etc. The instructions said to make this as big or as little a project as you want it to be. I asked Gus what things he wanted to include on his poster. Between the two of us, we came up with Family, Favorite Food, Favorite Game, Favorite Color, Favorite TV Show, Favorite Restaurant, Favorite Place to Visit, Favorite thing to do with Dad, Mom and Lucy, and I'm going to bring headings for each category. Gus and I went through and talked about whether we had a picture we could use for each category and which ones Gus would be in charge of.
  • Gus will write out all his family members
  • Gus will draw a picture to represent his favorite game
  • Gus will draw something black for his favorite color
  • Gus will draw a picture of his favorite thing to do with Lucy (hugging)
  • Gus will assemble the poster and glue everything on
Everything else is a picture that I have printed off the computer. Am I taking over too much for this project, or is this an acceptable level of help from me for this first grade project?

2 comments:

  1. These are hard questions. I feel like I'm never quite sure of what is developmentally appropriate for my kids. It sounds like what you have planned is reasonable. I don't think you're doing too much at all.

    I hope it goes well!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks so much. We want our kids to learn and do well, but not struggle while they learn, but also not enable them. I had him help with cutting out the headings for the pictures, and all the pictures (used a paper cutter) and instead of glue we used adhesive squares, so he had to put all those on every piece of paper. I just wonder "should he have done more" and "have I overstepped the line of parent help".

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