I Am, I Can, I Will (Audiocassettes)

Artist: Fred Rogers
Date: 1979
Format: Cassette
Label: Hubbard
Series: I Am, I Can, I Will
ISBN: 0394892828

Copyright © 1979 Family Communications, Inc.

Description

From a 1983 FCI product order form: "Mister Rogers talks and sings about individual strengths and weaknesses and encourages children to explore all that they are. Cassettes average 12 minutes in length."

Includes a 30-page "Suggestions For Use" booklet.

Tapes

1. You Are Special
• Increases a child's positive self-concept and encourages wholesome attitudes toward differences in others.
2. Feeling Happy, Feeling Sad
• Helps children identify their feelings and tell others how they feel.
3. Feeling Mad
• Helps children understand anger as a feeling we all have now and then and to encourage positive ways of expressing anger.
4. Wishing and Pretending
• Helps children understand the difference between reality and fantasy. Emphasizes the difference between wishing and doing.
5. Helping and Loving
• Helps children understand that there are many ways to express affection and that caring is just one of many strong feelings -- even anger.
6. Trying Again
• Helps children realize that many simple tasks require hard work (patience) and encourages them to do as much as they can by themselves (persistence).
7. Growing
• Helps children learn that different people grow differently, that growing takes patience and effort, and that there are adults who can help them grow.
8. Growing Up Without Sight
• Promotes the understanding that the person is more important than the handicap. Increases awareness of how it feels to be without sight while emphasizing what visually-impaired people can do.
9. Wake-Up Sounds
• Heightens listening skills and association of sounds with their sources.
10. Neighborhood Sounds
• Mister Rogers takes a pretend walk to a supermarket.
11. Going To Sleep
• Mister Rogers talks and sings about nighttime and going to bed.
12. The Story of Planet Purple
• A make-believe story about a place where everything is the same (boring) and where the characters come to appreciate differences (interesting).
13. Danny's Song
• A short drama about an eight-year-old physically handicapped child.
14. Francie's Fairy Tale
• A short drama about a young girl who makes up a story about a witch and an eagle to explain why she is sick and had to miss the circus.
15. Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe
    • A two-part musical story about a giraffe who grew up differently but learned that growing inside is important, too.

A Message From Fred Rogers

Family Communications, Inc. was formed to be the nonprofit production agency for our national public television series, MISTER ROGERS' NEIGHBORHOOD. Through this series of programs we have tried to make television a source of useful entertainment for young children and an aid to parents and others in helping their children grow. As a company, we specialize in communications that are meant to support personal development at all ages; however, all our work stems from a primary concern with the well-being of young children and their relationships to their families and other caregivers. Strong, healthy relationships during a child's early years are, we believe, the most important determinants of how strong and healthy a child will become in adolescence, maturity, and old age.

Few adult-child relationships are as important as the teacher-child relationship. In this relationship, a child will take his or her first steps in discovering that other adults in addition to parents can be trusted. With a teacher, a child can learn that there are others sympathetic to his or her hopeful strivings and feelings of vulnerability. A teacher can help children understand the demands which group life may place upon them and how they may become active citizens of the group. And children can learn, with a teacher's caring, to reach beyond the home-bound pleasures of toddlerhood to the wider horizons of classroom play and learning.

How difficult it is to understand the deep interconnections among the personal, social, and cognitive aspects of a child's growth! Perhaps most difficult of all is the nurturance of a child's self-esteem: that which gives children's social an cognitive learning real meaning. The effort is worthwhile! Teachers who place the nurturance of self-esteem at the center of their learning role most often reap the reward of seeing children grow and learn in very healthy ways.

Almost every early learning experience gives the opportunity for a child to gain self-esteem. Children grow in confidence when their curiosity is encouraged and their efforts to explore and discover are supported. They grow in self-respect when they have the chance to create their own play materials and when they are given the chance to experience the depth of their concentration and imagination. Their sense of self is enriched when they are encouraged to make up their own stories and plays and when they are given the freedom to express their inner concerns and to work on mastering them. Each taste of success, each experience of discovery, every toy made independently, every story spun from his or her own ideas, contributes to a child's feeling of being a capable person.

In short, self-esteem flourishes in partnership with an adult who is interested in a child's inner world. A teacher can do so much to help children understand and manage the feelings of that inner world. Most of all, a teacher, as an accepting and welcoming adult friend, can help children know that each one of them is a valuable person. This, in turn, helps children see themselves as learners and take pleasure in what they can become.

The materials in the I AM, I CAN, I WILL series are intended only to help teachers in their work with children. They are not substitutes for that work. We hope that teachers will find them useful resources and will invent many different ways to use them. The materials and the Suggestions for Use that go with them are only starting points.

You know the needs of the children in your care better than we who are not personally with you ever could; consequently, your relationship with them is much more important than ours can be. We hope that I AM, I CAN, I WILL becomes a very helpful resource to you. Your children's most valuable resource remains, of course, you, yourself.

- Fred Rogers

Notes

This set of tapes was featured on a 1983 FCI product order form selling for a cost of $74.95 per set or $5.95 for an individual cassette.