My essential question to my topic, early childhood education, is: what is the most important skill a child develops in preschool that helps them best excel academically in kindergarten? And one of my answers to this question was executive function skills, also known as self-regulation.
In this post I will be talking about what exactly is self-regulation and how it affects a child in their early learning and their future learning endeavors. Through one of my many Pinterest adventures I found this pin that led me to a website called Tools of the Mind.
History time! Tools of the Mind itself is a curriculum that began in 1993 at Metropolitan State College of Denver (now Metropolitan State University of Denver). It was created when Dr. Elena Bodrova and Dr. Deborah Leong began working together in early childhood classrooms to improve children's ability to learn and to teach educators new techniques for working with children.
Any who as I said before the pin/link led me to the website where it talks about self-regulation and how it affects children. Self-regulation itself as stated by the writers is "...a critical competency that underlies the mindful, intentional, and thoughtful behaviors of younger and older children alike...capacity to control one’s impulses, both to stop doing something, if needed (even if one wants to continue doing it) and to start doing something, if needed (even if one doesn’t want to do it)".
Evidence has shown that lack of self-regulation in many children has a great impact on how well they do in school and later in life. Self-regulation affects a child's ability to successfully function in school settings in two ways: social-emotional self-regulation which makes it possible for children to follow classroom rules; and second, cognitive self-regulation which allows children to use and further develop the cognitive processes necessary for academic learning.
It is through the help of this article and other resources I've read that I strongly believe executive function skills (self-regulation) needs to be developed in preschool to help the child succeed.
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