Social Skills, Morals and Fairy Tales
Guilt-Free Homeschooling has an interesting post about which Social Skills are important to teach a preschooler and offering ideas for instilling them in your child. By learning Social Skills your child should be on the front foot when it comes to that ugly word Socialisation. Carolyn includes ideas for: Patience, Sharing, Fairness, Sportsmanship, Appropriate Behaviour, Communication, Lengthening your child’s attention span, and Improving their Observation, Memory and Motor Skills.
Ragamuffin Studies has a post which I’ve taken a small snippet out of, as it is not the focus of the post (Moral Courage – which is really interesting in itself).
According to Dr. Kidder, there are five universal core moral principles. They are:
- honesty (a.k.a. truthfulness, integrity)
- fairness (a.k.a. justice)
- respect (tolerance and respect for self, family, others, and respect for life itself)
- responsibility (a.k.a. self-discipline)
- compassion (a.k.a empathy, mercy, love, generosity)
In order to behave ethically, a person must demonstrate all five of these.
and finally, Trinity Prep School has a summary of the value of Fairy Tales in your child’s life based on A Study of Fairytales by Laura Kready. I’m going to be bad and post it here excluding the lovely quotes she’s also gathered regarding Fairy Tales as I needed a good reminder myself :
- Fairy tales bring joy into a child’s life. Joy works toward physical health, mental brightness, and moral virtue. Joy is the mission of art and fairy tales are art products.
- Fairy tales give the child a power of accurate observation.
- Fairy tales strengthen the power of emotion, develop the power of imagination, train the memory, and exercise the faculty of reason.
- Fairy tales are play forms. The fairy tale, because it presents an organized form of human experience, helps to organize the mind and gives to play the values of human life.
- Fairy tales extend and intensify the child’s social relations. His sympathies are active for kindness and fairness, especially for the defenseless, and he feels deeply the calamity of the poor or the suffering and hardship of the ill-treated. He is in sympathy with that poetic justice which desires immediate punishment of wrong, unfairness, injustice, cruelty, or deceit.
- Fairy tales introduce real literature to the young child, so that having enjoyed real literature, he will later be eager to satisfy his own desires.
