Education in values is essential from an early age, so we should not pay attention solely to the development of language in early childhood education, is it necessary to promote autonomy, develop communicative and emotional capacities, models of coexistence?All this can be purchased and worked with fun and enjoyable features. The value tree is one of them.
When we talk about early childhood education, we’re talking about children from zero to six years old. This age group is ideal for working with the value tree.
- With this tool you will be able to understand the meaning of the values.
- What they are for and which are important to them.
- An activity that must be present in all kinds of children.
While you can work with the value tree in several different ways, there are three different parts that must be followed for this function to have the utility you are looking for.
The important thing is that when developing this tree, all children participate in collaboration, so in addition to working with values, cooperative learning is also worked.
First, to create the tree of values it is necessary to present different behaviors and values, do children not initially know what creativity, honesty or empathy is?
Although there are values they know, such as friendship or respect, is it normal that the vast majority do not know them, although I can practice them. Therefore, they must be presented.
A good way to do this is to place examples of values in the tree. Because children love stories, we can adapt them to present some value. In addition, a short film can be used if this value is difficult to understand. be an option to present values to children, for example.
Now that children have had first contact with values, especially those who were new to them, it’s time to identify them through different behaviors.
For this, it is also possible to use stories or short films. To make the activity more fun, children can form groups.
It is also possible to use images for children to identify values, each image refers to one of them, so that they can then identify as many values as they can, finally, history can be one of the last exercises, since they will have to pay special attention and, in this way, work on their understanding
Once the previous two steps have been completed, it is time to create the value tree, for this all groups must put on the table all the values that have been identified in the images, in the short or in the story, depending on the activity that is performed. It’s been carried out.
Children are responsible for classifying values according to their importance, this is interesting because it will be necessary to negotiate and dialogue, because each child will have a different point of view, the most relevant ones will be placed on the upper branches of the tree, and those they consider of lower value will be placed at the bottom.
This activity can help groups relate to each other and explain why certain values are of great importance to each other. This is a very interesting exercise in which you can develop other types of values, such as tolerance, for example.
We can conclude that the value tree is a very complete activity and also supports many variations. This can be done as a group, but also individually, however, it is not recommended to choose this second option without working previously with the value axis, as this is an exercise that can be very complicated at first.
What is interesting is that, while the Tree of Values is a very useful tool in early childhood education, parents can also play with it at home, if they wish, an entertainment with which the little ones will begin to understand that behaviors represent values and principles. , and that we are often unaware of its consequences.