When we were dating, my husband never thought I was unsocialized, I was certainly capable of holding my own in our conversations. However, socially there was a little something different about the WAY I interacted with his friends that he couldn’t put his foot on. After we had been married for a couple of years he had a Eureka moment, and told me that homeschooling is it’s own culture. When people ask “What about socialization?”, I now think that what they usually mean is “What about the public schooling culture?” The mutual culture of sending your kids to school every day at the same time, of participating in spelling bees, going to parent-teacher conferences, of doing the same activities as the kids the same age as you, and counting on doing the same thing as the kid one year older than you, next year. It’s a real, genuine culture, and that culture is very important to some people. Homeschoolers are not a part of that culture, we have our own culture- the culture of going to local homeschooling group activities, a culture with it’s own lingo, like Classical Education, Unschooling, Charlotte Mason method, etc. A small part of why I have been determined to homeschool my kids is because I grew up in the homeschooling culture and wanted it.
But I digress. This thread is specifically about teaching social skills. While learning to get along with siblings is great practice, I am learning more and more that social behavior is something that needs to be taught. I had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with Ashly yesterday, in person, and she told me more about a program she is using called Kimochis. She had the teacher curriculum for me to look at and I was amazed at the high quality of the book. At the end there is a helpful index where you can easily thumb through to a specific negative behavior, like your kid saying “You’re not invited to my birthday party!”, with suggested lessons to work on. I’ve been ho-humming about it. The dolls are available for $25-$30 dollars, both on their main website and on Amazon, but the teacher’s manual is ONLY available in a $350 package which includes 5 dolls and extra “feelings” pillows. I realized that the whole reason I even want the dolls is so I can use them to teach my children to have emotional intelligence, and the curriculum is what I need to help make it happen. I really do think that at the heart of misbehavior is negative emotions, and that the solution is to understand our emotions, how they work, and what we need to do to overcome them. Kimochis teach that it’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to be mean. I have a few highly sensitive children (okay, I’ve seen the neighbors do it too, it’s normal childhood behavior), and my husband and I have not seen anything in the market that comes close to teaching emotional intelligence as these toys. From an EL point of view, Ashly said that her kids LOVE the fact that the feelings pillows have words on them. She has had some amazing success with the Kimochis, both in her home, and at church where she has occasionally taught young children with them. They are a big ticket item, but they’re next on our list. My husband hasn’t wanted any EL product as much as this one. In the end, good behavior and social skills are something we want our children to have even more than the reading, math, and other academics. Being nice and polite will get you far in life. I truly haven’t seen anything on the market that compares to Kimochis. If social skills is something you want to accelerate, take a look!
http://www.kimochis.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/kimochime/videos
