Tag: speech therapy

Help Your Children Understand The Core Values of Friendship

Published on by Coach Benjamin MizrahiLeave a comment

The following activity will take between 20-25 minutes of your time but will have a lasting impact on your child’s life!

Helping your child understand what true, loyal, and happy friendship is can be a complicated task. You should not give up the opportunity to know how your child perceives friendship and what s/he is willing to tolerate to stay in friendship with others.

Below, you can find two charts I created (one for boys and one for girls) to help young students understand the pillars of healthy and happy friendship. We did it as follows:

  1. My child and I spoke about her friends and asked various GENERAL questions about her social dynamic in school.
  2. To make a smooth transition I asked: “Could you complete the sentence: A good friend is….” Fill-in-the-blank questions are more engaging than questions like “Who do you think can be a good friend?”
  3. I suggested we will search in the internet for pictures that described a good friend.
  4. We found four pictures that encompass the values I wanted to illustrate with her: inclusiveness, loyalty, respect, and diversity.

It is essential that your child will describe the picture and only then complete the sentence. Also, make sure to revolve the conversation around the value YOU think are relevant to your child’s social dynamic with her/his friends.

Friendship- GIRLS

Friendship- BOYS

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Impulse control (video)

Published on by Coach Benjamin MizrahiLeave a comment

The following video is an illustration of how impulse control can come in the way of young students. It important to remind ourselves that having weak impulse control (Response Inhibition) is NOT a character trait, rather a developmental issue that can be solved with coaching.

I encourage you to watch this video with your child (ages 5-8):

Ask them if this situation is familiar, and feel free to share with them the last time it was difficult for YOU to resist what you wanted to say/do. Talk about the how we feel after and how others might feel when we interrupt them in the middle of an activity or a conversation. Finally, invite them to join you in creating ways to deal with the need to say/do something out of turn. Some strategies that work for students in 1st through 4th grades are:

– Sitting on a cushion

– Stretching while sitting

– Asking to be the teacher’s helper.

– Asking to introduce the story (if you are familiar with it).

– Setting a signal with the teacher to take a short break.

These are just examples to help your child think about strategies that work for THEM.

You should feel free to share with me your experience and ask questions if you wish.