Assignment 8

1. Describe your child’s academic skills between ages 6 and 10 and assess how well these skills are developing. The 5th grade report card will be useful for this but you should also incorporate your own observations. What are you doing to help your child?

I think I am very fortunate with my virtual child, Sky has done nothing but continuously improve in the academic areas. Sky’s current report card stated strengths in reading, spelling, writing, speaking, and listening.  Sky has also been reported as average in the areas of math, graphical applications, arithmetic computation, art and music.  This makes me extremely happy because Sky has struggled all the time with math, I think it had a lot to do with her attitude as much as the understanding aspect of it.  I think that my strategy has finally paid off with Sky, for example Sky would get frustrated with certain math problems and instead of me just doing the problem for her I would have her refer back to example problems and try to figure it out.  When Sky would become too frustrated that’s when I would step in and assist her.  The process seems to have finally paid off, I cant take all the credit though because Sky is a very intelligent individual and is going to do very well in 6^th grade.

 

2. How well is your child adapting to social situations in the home and outside the home? Does your child have any behavior or emotional problems at this point? Why do you think these problems are occurring and what are you doing about them?

Sky is a very popular person at school and has a lot of friends, very rarely do we have behavior problems with Sky and when we do she seems to recover very quickly.  On occasion Sky has been known to act out in stressful situations but liked I mentioned earlier seems to come out of it quickly.  I think that it is extremely normal for a child to act out every once in a while, me as a parent haven’t really done much of anything about it because it is not a major issue right now.  If it were to become an issue at any time I would take Sky back to the basics of how to act in public and focus on proper manners and how to control emotions.

 

3. Has your parenting changed since the preschool period and if so, why do you think it has changed and what effect might this have on your child? Refer to your textbook or lecture notes for evidence on typical changes in parenting that occur in middle childhood.

I don’t feel that my parenting style has changed at all since Sky was in preschool, the only thing that has changed is me and my partner are know longer together.  By me stating that my parenting style hasn’t changed doesn’t mean I haven’t had to adapt to new methods of ensuring my child’s education.  That is the only example I can think of, what I mean by that is since I receive report cards about my child’s learning abilities I am able to see where Sky needs some help, so when I notice Sky is lagging in math I can change my methods on how I begin to get her interested in that particular subject.  The only example from the text that I can think of that involves my parenting ways is Erikson’s theory on Industry VS. inferiority.  The way I changed my parenting style as mentioned above goes along with industry, because I promote a positive learning environment with Sky and work on making her feel confident in skills she is lacking on.  For example as mentioned above with the math problems and according to Sky’s report card she is doing better and too me that proves that Sky is becoming confident and more proficient at math.