Toddlers and young children may not be able to verbally express their preferences or individual personality yet, but that does not mean they don’t exist. In fact, many characteristics can be recognized from early childhood already and continue to develop from there.
Though, not everyone is aware of what to look for when it comes to identifying these individual traits. If you do not work with children or have your own, it may prove more difficult.
Learning journal software is a useful tool that helps educators, parents, and carers with spotting distinct personality characteristics in children. Keep on reading if you would like to learn more about it.
What Information Helps To Understand Personality Traits?
Each child is unique and their different backgrounds play a big part in their personality development. Learning journals take relevant information from each child and use software to gather data for identifying links and commonalities.
The information necessary for this to happen includes documenting your observations of the child at school or at home, small achievements, comments from parents, teachers, and carers, activities or tasks completed, progress analysis, among others. In addition to this, the child’s curriculum can also be found in the learning journal for greater insight into what their activities and progress reports are often based on.
When all this information is stored on a central system and analyzed automatically, trends, and patterns in a child’s behavior start becoming evident. This is when individual traits can start becoming clearer.
Knowing What To Look Out For
In order to be able to spot unique personality characteristics in children, there needs to be some knowledge on what kind of signs to look out for.
The importance of including progress updates and achievements in a learning journal will help with precisely this. Gradually, results will begin to convey relationships between activities and outcomes. Once this is studied it will become easier to apprehend in the future.
It is important to note that, just like adults, children experience mood swings and different states of mind too. Having the ability to differentiate between a bad mood and a grumpy personality trait is essential. Recording moods and emotions in a learning journal software easily pull out sequences that will make this differentiation more apparent.
Combining Home Observations With School Observations
A useful element of learning journal software is the ability for parents to include their own observations taken at home.
Children act differently depending on their environment. Their home behavior may possibly be unlike their behavior at school. This is dependent on many factors though, suggesting that it’s very dependent on each different circumstance.
Still, the information that can be compared to home behavior versus school behavior could yield some fascinating results. The combination of these would offer some insight into how their personality changes between the two environments if there are any differences.
The shared comments between parents, teachers, and carers can emphasize certain behaviors or traits that may be more frequent than others.
The Effects Of Routines Or No Routines
Something that can influence personality development is the presence or absence of a routine. Seeing that a learning journal documents activities, tasks, and progress, etc, it will be able to offer information regarding the child’s routine.
Any behavioral changes depending on the routine, or lack thereof, can possibly be attributed to a personality trait of the individual.
You could compare data from days with routines against days without routines, and monitor those changes. Some changes in behavior could derive from temperament or simple mood variations, as was previously mentioned, but after a while, there could be enough information to make a fairly realistic conclusion concerning personality.
Final Thoughts
Spotting individual character traits in children can take some time. Many factors will add to the results, some of which may cause difficulty when trying to understand behaviors and personalities.
With a learning journal, however, many patterns and similarities will start to develop over time, enabling you to pick up on recurring behaviors and moods. With this information, it’s likely that you will start to notice individual personality traits coming through.
No personality is set in stone and often environments and backgrounds have a huge impact on them. And naturally, as children develop into teenagers and adults, their personalities will too. Even so, their individual traits from early childhood will have various effects on them later, in some way or another.
