Reflective Essay: My Initial Play Therapy

Make sure that their conversation is within confidential space meaning that only you the practitioner with the child and the parent.

The practitioner has many responsibilities when engaging in professional relationships with children, their families, colleagues and other professionals. A very important thing to think about when it comes to the relationships with the family is confidentiality and building trust. Beaver, M (2008). When working in an early years setting having a good relationship with the parents should be important because parents have the most knowledge and understanding of their child, if they have good relationships with the practitioner they are more likely to want to share this knowledge and then they will feel valued and the child will benefit. A practitioner should always be diverse and engage in inclusive practice. A practitioner should

Fill in the blank. Whether it's the counselor, the nurse, the patient, the roommate, the showers, the suggestion that those pictures on the website that was all just a line mom. Your son or daughter is very likely to tap into those old emotions that you might remember that we discussed in the back off circle. The title of that video was Balancing Boundaries with Compassion. You may remember we talked about your son or daughters conscious or even unconscious ability to tap into your emotions of guilt, sympathy, fear, doubting your memory or your decisions, threatening to embarrass you, or better yet convincing you with hope that they really understand and that you really can back off of your very reasonable limits or expectations for boundaries. So if you find yourself feeling guilty, sympathetic, afraid, doubtful, afraid your son or daughter is going to embarrass you,

It is also paramount that I have a professional, open and honest relationship with the parents/carers and it is essential that we are able to communicate with each other.

yourself to the child and find out their likes and dislikes. It is important to establish clear rules and

A child/young person greeted by a friendly playworker and a smile at the beginning of a session is likely to feel at ease straight away and enjoy their play experience.

This is a good way to develop your practice, because you are exploring different skills and knowledge with children each day, and you are helping them in their development and

In order to improve their work with young children practitioners use their own learning by using ways of work that are non-judgemental, sensitive and positive. Therefore, practitoners through initial on-going training and development need to develop, and demonstrate and continuously improve a number of things in their work. They may have to work with the wider community such as parents and carers and also with other professionals with inside and outside the setting. They may have to improve on their relationships with both the children and their parents and develop a knowledge and understanding of the diverse ways that children can learn in order to support and extend children’s learning across all areas and aspects of learning (Leicestershire County Council).

As a TA You can do with this by praising and encouraging the child to build up good relationship and friendships with other children or children they may not usually associate with. When communicating with younger children it is really very important that we make eye contact with the child and use simple instructions broken down into manageable steps. With some children with educational needs you may have to use alternative forms of communication like in our practice we use hands gestures, pictures or symbols.

Sitting together with their parents helps they feel more secured. Gaining their trust and using their language like “sore, hurt, ouch” would help with the questions. Using dolls and puppets to demonstrate the assessment would also be a good tool to gain their trust. Ask easy questions about their age, class, teacher to start the conversation and then to proceed with the assessment. Ask the kids to show their hands and feet first, because they like to show their feet and hands according to Jarvis, 2016. Explain to the child what you are going to do before you touch him. This will decrease his anxiety and facilitate the visit.

I choose to film my play therapy session with my six year old niece, Jazmine. The first session with Jazmine was nondirective or child centered play therapy. “Non-directive play therapy makes no effort to control or change the child and is based on the theory that the child’s behavior is at all times caused by a drive for complete self-realization.” (Landreth, 2012) Therefore, I allowed Jazmine to direct the play. While she played with her various dolls and toys, I verbally tracked her play, body movements, facial and vocal expressions. This allowed Jazmine to know that she had my undivided attention. Although I was not comfortable with tracking her movements, because this is not a normal action during our play, she did not seem to be affected by the tracking. I did feel more involved with Jazmine because I had to be fully present with her in order to properly track her play. In addition, she seemed to like the positive attention and it fueled her play.

Working with children requires us to build positive relationships with them quickly, but also in ways that are professional.

The teacher or teaching assistant would need to make sure that the child sat at the front of the class. The person leading the lesson would have to ensure that their face is clearly visible and background noise should be kept to a minimum. Teaching the child in a small group or individually would be a benefit and a quite area should be found for this. The teacher should try and limit the time spent talking in group sessions to a minimum and ensure that they have visual aids available as well as writing key words on the board for the child. The other children in the class should be encouraged to

Today is my first day doing my practice observation in the Infant Room Classroom Number 3, my fears are how the infants go reaction to see me because I am new person for them that they never have seen before, how the teacher go feel to have a student in the classroom, if they will support me and cooperate with practice, and how the parents will response to see a new teacher in the classroom, I know for my teaching experience that parents are very special about the people who is round to their children.

* establishes a system of praise and constructive criticism - rewards and improvement; grows with the organisation