Hi,
Language skills play a vital role in problem solving and other human activities
I really enjoyed the article here which discusses language skills and the teacher. The strategies I think can be used and be very useful in the home environment. http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/speech-language/thinking_with_language.html
” Language skills are incredibly crucial as it relates to one’s ability be flexible and deal with frustration. Problem solving is essentially a linguistic skill. Why? Most of the thinking and communicating that we do involves language. Language skills set the stage for labeling, categorizing, communicating and managing (meta cognitive strategies) our emotions. They also kick-start problem solving by allowing us to label and communicate the problem, and do the necessary verbal give and take.
Children with difficulty in this domain, may get hung up at any point. They may not have a rudimentary vocabulary for labeling their emotions (happy ,sad ,frustrated ), may not be able to articulate their concerns ( “I am hungry/tired”, “I am in the middle of something”) and may not have a problem solving vocabulary ( “I need help”). When faced with frustration, or when trying to process situations later with the child, children lacking in this domain can often be heard saying such things as: “shut-up”, “get away” , “I don’t know”, “I don’t want to talk about it” or they may swear ” - Collaborative problem solving ( CPS) care giver’s handout http://explosivekids.org
There are so many teaching moments that parents and their kids can enjoy, if we begin to focus on cooperation, sharing , teaching rather than getting compliance using behavior modification. Interacting with your kids using dialog questions see Myrna Shure
Here are links from the site
http://www.thinkingpreteen.com/thinkingchildexc.htm
http://www.thinkingpreteen.com/thinkingparent_excerpt.htm
http://www.thinkingpreteen.com/thinkingpreteenexc.htm - read first
describing situations, concepts, words improves immensely this important skill as well as many others
Yours Allan