Help me please ideas for self esteem activities.

[thecloudhopper]

I have been asked to develop some ideas to inforce possitive self esteem and have drawn a blank any ideas would be appreciated.

For whom? You child or children you teach? Age?

For reception age children.

Get them to say something nice about the person sitting next to them in circle time or something?

In my DD's class last year the children each had to draw a picture of another child in the class (allocated by the teacher or by lottery, not chosen by the child) and to talk about their lovely features. And then each child brought the portrait of them done by another child home. A good way of learning to say nice things about others!

Bonsoir, dd has also done that at school. Lovely idea I thought

They also have 'talking partners' where they talk about a topic with each other andn then tell the rest of the class what the other thinks about the topic etc

I think learning to be nice to one another (there are lots of ways to encourage this) is probably a good start in reception. After all, when you are nice to other people, they tend to be nice back to you and you get into a self-esteem "positive loop".

Having said that, teaching children civilised ways of defending themselves when attacked by others is also good for self-esteem. For example, teaching children to say "Don't be rude to me" when taunted by another child is a good thing. I think that the old-fashioned way of teaching children to ignore others' bad behaviour directed at them is very bad for self-esteem.

My dc in reception sang a song every morning which included lines like "I'm vey special" and "I'm the most important person in my life".

I suspect it was thought that it would be in the interests of their self esteem.

However I read something about how narcissistic personality traits are thought ot have significantly increased in American youth in recent years and how people think this is linked to the kind of approach taken in schools where, to supposedly build self esteem, children are taught to think about how special they are, how great they are, etc