Dagmar & Dana (SK)

Story of Dagmar and Dana

DAGMAR is a headmaster and teacher with almost 30 years of practice in kindergarten. She is always looking for problem solving and improvement of preschool environment conditions.

DANA is a teacher cooperating with Dagmar, with 25 years of practice in kindergarten. She is openminded and always interested in innovations in her profession.

They offer their story concerning P2G:

By the time we joined the project, Oliver had been in our class for four years. First three years he often missed classes, he used to be sick or when he didn’t want to come to the kindergarten, his mother just didn’t bring him. She was on parental leave with the second child. But last year, she started to work, and Oliver simply had no choice. He had to go to kindergarten. This state was reflected in his behaviour: “I just have to be here, I have to stand it here.” He took it as a necessary evil that he had to survive. He was not interested in games and he hardly communicated with children and adults. He was not aggressive, but rather apathetic and often tearful. He sat, watching children from afar and when they were noisy, he was covering his ears. He responded to the games and activities offered to him: “I do not want to play or do anything. I will sit here waiting for my mother”. He isolated himself from children, adults and the environment.

That is why the first word we characterized him was ISOLATION. He created his own world, where he was only with himself and isolated from others. And he escaped into his own world. So, the second word that characterized him was the ESCAPE. He seemed to love stories about Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America, Batman, ghosts and zombies. He reproduced the whole dialogues from the animated series and pretended to be one of the above-mentioned characters. But he played on his own. The third word was LONELINESS. He didn´t want to join the group of playing children, he was just observing them but without any interest.  

Our goal, we set was to include and socialize him into a group of children. We realized that it is necessary to build sensitive relationship with him first and agreed that this is what we expected from the P2G project in Oliver´s case.

During the relational games, where the lead of the game is taken over by the child, we established a closer relationship with Oliver. It could be seen that Oliver feels comfortable as a game leader. Occasionally other children joined us, and at that time his joy in leadership became even more evident. Over the time, a change in Oliver’s behaviour became more evident – he stopped closing himself in his own world, started to join the games with children, and moreover, he even took the role of a leader in many games. We realized that following the ideas of P2G through the individual steps is an appropriate way to build up sensitive relationship with a child leading to minimizing his challenging behaviour. As we stated in the beginning, Oliver had been in the class for three years and we couldn´t find suitable methods how to help him. At the beginning of implementing P2G, we were in doubt, if we are correct in the procedures, so we checked our responses in relational games and sometimes it seemed to us to be artificial. With the change of Oliver´s behaviour and our growing experience, we started to feel more comfortable and confident in playing sessions.    

Impact of the P2G was great, Oliver became a confident and independent boy who has no problem with integrating into a group of children. And we are very pleased with it. Today, Oliver is a freshman in an elementary school and he still visits us in the kindergarten and shares his experiences with us. Oliver´s case persuaded us that P2G is the right way how to build the sensitive relationship with the child and in such a way, it is a right tool for prevention as well as intervention of challenging behaviour – the help for children and teachers.