Self-Aware Schedule with Aly
Self-awareness is the kind of skill that takes practice to develop. We go through our lives living, not thinking about our emotions, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, values, identity, and everything else that makes up who we are.
So, it takes a little intentional practice to stop and think about what it is that makes us special. You can help your kiddo develop stronger self-awareness skills while they learn more about structured thinking and organization with a schedule.
In the video above, Dr. Aly Goldstein walks you through the steps to create a self-awareness schedule with your kiddo, pinpointing different parts of their day along with the emotions they felt at the time.
You can also use this technique to reflect on your day and notice emotional patterns that affect how you feel when you do everyday activities.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hi, it’s Aly Goldstein here at HeyKiddo™ and today I'm really excited to share with you a self-awareness schedule that you can do with your child.
Self-awareness is a really important social and emotional skill that helps kids understand and recognize themselves as individuals. Self-awareness is all about the question, “How do I know and understand myself?”
With self-awareness we can understand our strengths and build on them and we can also understand our emotions and behaviors such as confidence and a strong sense of self.
A piece of self-awareness we'll talk about today is helping your child understand their emotions by identifying, “How do I feel in different situations?”
One powerful way to build self-awareness is through self-reflection by experience as we begin to develop a stronger understanding of ourselves.
We previously offered a video that provides a way to schedule your child's day and I want to build on that schedule to use a tool to help your child build self-awareness.
I'm going to walk you through how I set up my self-awareness schedule and then you can use this as a tool to collaborate with your child through self-reflection.
So, as you can see, here is my self-awareness schedule. I put a title at the top and then I went out and scheduled a break down of my day. I chose to break it down into three different sections--the morning, afternoon and evening.
You can make it as detailed as you want to--maybe adding specific times or even specific activities that your child was engaged in like the specific type of fun activities they did and doing that for the whole day.
Then at the top, I chose three ways I wanted to communicate or describe the feelings I typically feel throughout the day so I chose this face for happiness, this for mad and this one for feeling frustrated.
The cool part about this is that there are so many creative ways for kids to describe how they are feeling.
I want to also show you some other options for ways for your kid to creatively describe how they were feeling throughout the day. So, one child that I worked with before used color to describe the way that they feel.
And so, when I ask them how they would describe different feelings with colors. They say when I feel frustrated, I call it red. When I feel calm and happy and okay, I call it grey and when I feel really happy or excited it feels like purple.
So, they use these words to describe their feelings throughout the day. You can also choose objects or pictures or even animals to describe the way that you're feeling. So here's one more example: for this child, I didn't want to choose frustration as kind of their down emotion.
They wanted to say they feel “off” and more sad and down throughout the day so they chose cloudy to say when they're feeling down.
When they're feeling calm and content, that feels starfish-y and when they're feeling very happy and excited to them that feels funny and so they wanted to use these objects and animals to describe how they're feeling throughout the day.
There is no wrong way to describe this and it can be so fun for your child to creatively think about how they want to describe how they feel.
So, after you've written out the schedule for the activities and the time frame that you want and identified at the top different ways that your kid wants to express how they were feeling and describe their feelings, go through the day with your child and for each activity ask them, “How did you feel?”
Then, your child can ask themselves “how did I feel at that time during that activity.
I’ll give a couple of examples of my activity.
So, in the morning during breakfast, I was feeling pretty happy. I had a good breakfast. It was really nice outside and I was feeling great. And then I did some work and I was feeling...it wasn't feeling as happy but I wasn't feeling particularly frustrated either.
And then in the afternoon, I took a walk and felt really happy. I love being outside. During lunch someone ate all the leftovers that I planned to eat so I was feeling a little frustrated.
Then, I had meetings in the afternoon and I enjoy talking with people and so I was okay again. That's why I did that myself, how I felt throughout the day during the different activities.
I hope this helps your child organize and self-reflect on their experiences as this helps them develop a better understanding of how they feel during certain activities throughout the day.
I hope that you really enjoy doing this activity with your child and have a wonderful day!