Through the years in the group home we were often asked, "How do you get those kids to cooperate with each other?" First let it be said that they didn't always get along! It was, however, possible with most of the different combinations of children to get them to cooperate.
First, we only dealt with three rules: Safety, Respect, and Do your job. When things went wrong, there was no big hassle to decide which of the three rules were broken. Second, as each new child joined the group home we held a community meeting in which the children discussed the three main rules, and then made new family rules - such as borrowing clothes, going into each others rooms, etc.
Then, the children talked about how to divide up the jobs, what to do when something goes wrong, what outings they wanted, etc. Because the children themselves made the rules and the procedure for fixing mistakes, we got pretty good cooperation.
We took our kids all over on vacations. As far away as Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona, on and on they went. One year we had a really difficult group, but still wanted them to experience a vacation. We took them to Lake Powell, Utah (or Arizona - depending on where we were travelling), on a houseboat. We had a wonderful, safe vacation.
They understood that all the wonderful experiences we had couldn't have been done without cooperation.
No comments:
Post a Comment