How to fight peer pressure - Teaching children healthy comparison.
It’s important to reinforce your lessons throughout the week. This helps to cement the concepts and internalize the tools for success. It also demonstrates to your students that these tools are important to you as you model how to use them in class.
In lesson one of Caveman Rock we learned about comparison. As you incorporate this concept into your week, look for things you can compare. Be sure to distinguish between healthy comparisons and unhealthy comparisons. Below are some examples to give you some ideas.
Older Children
Make it Personal. Add your own life-lessons on comparing. Your students love to hear about your victories and your disasters. My daughter, Brittney, teaches Caveman Rock - School Edition in her classroom. She shared the story of how she wore bright blue eye shadow and ugly icy purple lipstick trying to impress kids in a new school. When she heard the kids refer to her as the girl who wears the blue and purple makeup she realized she didn’t want to be known as the "Blue Girl." She tells her students how embarrassed she was with her makeup disaster. "I compared myself to the popular girls who wore lots of makeup (theirs looked pretty, but mine was too over the top), and did something that wasn’t showing my very best self." She ends her story by encouraging her students to not compare themselves to others but instead be your best self! (The older girls especially love her makeup disaster story.)
Younger Children
Preschool-1st grade: Younger children have a harder time imagining themselves in another person's shoes. Give them clear concrete examples of comparison. For example, point out someone with brown hair, and someone with blonde hair and ask your children what is different about their hair color. Discuss that this kind of comparing is okay. Then ask your child if its still good comparison if you say one hair color is better or worse than another. Younger children tend to understand abstract concepts when they can see something concrete first, and then asked how they feel about it.
Bring it back to Championeers! Caveman Rock!
Discuss that Al-x compared himself to other cavemen who were better fishermen, and that Al-x didn’t need to be the best fisherman to still be a great caveman. Being a good or bad fisherman doesn’t make you a good or bad caveman. Our differences just make us uniquely, wonderfully different than each other, and that’s what makes each of us so special.
Together, we can do this,
Deanna
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