Giving Children Agency to Self-Regulate
Supporting children to begin regulating themselves is challenging, not least because this area of development may not be widely understood( see“ What Educators Need to Know About Self-Regulation”). In the following sections, we outline how preschool educators can scaffold children to become more self-regulated before entering kindergarten and how kindergarten teachers can continue working on strengthening children’ s emergent self-regulation abilities.
Plan Activities to Enhance Self-Regulation
Young children benefit from practicing deliberate and purposeful behaviors in playful ways. Indeed, using play to promote self-regulation is part of developmentally appropriate practice. These skills that are learned during play later transfer into being able to pay attention and remember the steps in solving problems in math and decoding words when reading.
they receive. Children also begin to learn to regulate each other in following the rules. For example, when playing a card game, children will remind a child who tries to go out of turn that they have to wait.
Use Visual Reminders to Scaffold Self-Regulation
Just as math manipulatives help children learn number concepts, visible and tangible reminders like a small poster or an index card bolster children’ s agency in developing self-regulation. Visual reminders can be used to help children remember the rules of a game, whose turn it is, or the steps in a multistep activity without adult prompting. For example, a pictorial representation of the steps in a kindergarten math activity might be 1) Sort by triangles and squares; 2) Count the triangles and squares; 3) Write the number of triangles and the number of squares. Another example is passing around a pretend microphone or talking stick as a way to remind preschoolers to wait for their turn to talk.
Other contexts that give children opportunities to practice self-regulation can range from following simple rules in movement games to following multistep directions necessary to complete a science experiment. These kinds of activities help children practice following rules, accepting feedback, and changing a course of action when they need to. For example, games like Simon Says or Red Light, Green Light require children to inhibit their immediate impulse to move and to follow the rules instead. Activities with multistep directions offer children practice in remembering and following multiple steps instead of performing only the final direction
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