Reflections: Let's Reflect with 3!

I was drafting a post about our Growth Mindset Spring Camp that took place during the March Holidays last week and I thought that discussing our perspective towards reflections is vital. This post was going to start by asking: How do you do reflections? However, in the process of putting my thoughts together, I had another question and thought it might be better to start with this:

Do you reflect?

Why is it important to do reflections? Reflections make us conscious about our actions, so that we can be responsible for them. We often think of reflections as an act whenever we do badly, and a method to turn to to come up with ideas for a "better next time". But at FUN Commune, we use reflections to celebrate our wins too! Reflections shouldn't be limited to making improvements or negative outcomes. They help us recognise and be mindful towards the things that we have done better in the current course of actions, e.g., I dislike Fractions, but I took the step today to attempt them! Celebrating this is soooooo important because it is the initial big step towards the bigger goal of excelling in Fractions! When we celebrate such wins, we are shifting our minds that these are positive and valuable actions (and we should do more of them!). This will then encourage us towards doing challenging and un-motivating tasks (such as trying Fractions). This process is the crux of having a growth mindset - to keep trying no matter how hard it is, and when we keep trying, we can accomplish things so much bigger!

During the Camp, we used the following cues for our reflections:

Reflection Cue 1: What have I just done?

This question was first to build children's working memory to recollect the events that just occurred. More often, they would go straight into what they loved (and disliked most haha!). It initially required a little more cues to begin but we loved how the kids got the hang of it and be aware of their happenings!

Reflection Cue 2: What are the feelings?

Going through the positive feelings are as important as the negative ones because we want to instil positive mindset. At the same time, we may be feeling more than just what 'happy', 'sad' or 'dislike' can describe. It may be 'inspired', 'amusement' 'proud', 'accomplished' or 'frustration', 'disappointment', 'annoyed', 'boredom'. Going through this cue allows us to help children use the appropriate words to describe how they truly feel. As a result, children can express their feelings accurately and others can understand them better. These expressions will then lead to the right strategies to better emotional regulation.

Reflection Cue 3: What did I really enjoy?

More often, we discuss about what we dislike or are unhappy more than we talk about what went well. This cue was explicitly inserted to have children think about the good that may have happened as our minds are often clouded by bad happenings. But we truly believe that in all bad things, there must be something good! Finding the good in a bad day (e.g., Everything was so bad the entire day!! But hey, I had time for lunch, phew!) will encourage us to keep going!

I hope that these cues can help you and your child to kickstart your reflections, because there are so many things in our lives that are worth celebrating! Before I end this post, I'm exceptionally excited to share more on our Camp and I will be breaking them into a series as there were just so many learning points throughout. Do stay tune to the first of the series where I will be sharing on our trip out to the wet market with the kids to purchase their ingredients for lunch-making!

Till then,

Kei