Monday, April 08, 2013

Kids In The House: Discipline and Conflict in Preschool




It was almost exactly one year ago that I winged down to Santa Monica to take part in a project called Kids In The House, which launched last week. The idea is a comprehensive collection of short parenting videos from a wide variety of perspectives, dealing with just about everything under the sun. Eighteen of those videos are from yours truly, one of which I've embedded below.

Leana Greene and her team have now assembled some 8000 two-minute (or so) videos from over 400 parent educators, authors, psychiatrists, doctors, parents, and teachers. I was impressed with their dedication and professionalism from the moment they first made contact with me and am quite proud to be a part of it. As Leana explained to me at the time, this is just the beginning: the idea is to continually add to their library.

And this just isn't early childhood. I've been having a look this weekend at many terrific videos on parenting a teen. I find myself nodding to some and disagreeing with others, but that's kind of the beauty: it's like getting a dozen experts in a room with you to give you their elevator spiel on a given topic. You can then pick the ones that seem right for you and your situation and go deeper.

This first video I'm sharing here is my thumbnail sketch on how the kids make their own rules in our preschool. If you decide you want to go deeper, here are links to some other posts on the topic: A Community of Their Own Creation"You and Your Friends Agreed . . .", and Without Talking There Are No Solutions. If you even want to go deeper, just click on the "rules" tag under the "Teacher Tom's topics" heading in the right hand column of the blog.

So for those of you who haven't seen this one yet, it might come as a shock that I'm not dressed in cape and spandex. And this is the sacrifice I've made for Kids In The House: the world now knows my secret identity.



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6 comments:

Lee B said...

This is great! Thank you for sharing such a neat resource. I can't wait to see more (as a teacher AND a parent)!

Lee B.

Kelly Pfeiffer said...

Tom, thanks for the video. I shared your post on one of my facebook pages - Think It Through Child Care Training.
Yes, children must learn to solve conflicts themselves to develop a true internal compass that guides them. Solving more conflicts = more skills, more experience, more trust in the process!

Mullin Avenue Workshop said...

What a great idea, and it was great to see the real you, Tom!
cheers,
Brenda

Kate said...

SO bizarre to actually watch you after reading your blog for so long!!!!! Wow!!!! Awesome video!!!

TuTiTu said...

Thanks for sharing a great video. No doubt about it one picture is worth a thousand words ! Great job, just love it !

Martha said...

Great post. Thanks for sharing this and keep posting.