Quality Interactions in Early Childhood: From Collaborative Classroom

 

 From: CollaborativeClassroom

By Emily Grunt | Categories: Early Childhood, Tutoring and Expanded Learning, Social-Emotional Learning

Quality interactions foster a sense of security and belonging in children and provide a strong root system to strengthen early cognitive, social, and emotional development.

Author Emily Grunt shares the following building blocks that lay a solid foundation for building quality interactions in an early childhood environment.

Quality—as an adjective—is subjective.

However, we can identify common goals for quality interactions with young children, including:

• Increased equitable outcomes for children through an environment where individual differences are honored and celebrated 
• Increased child confidence and capability through an environment of safety and respect
• Increased teacher efficacy through positive relationships with the children in their care 

High quality doesn’t exist without creating belonging for all and without learning supports for diverse learners.

Equity Early Group
Jennifer Park, Ph.D., University of Florida

Step 1: Trust

The children in our care must believe that we will act with integrity and that they can count on us being as good as our word.

We can establish a trusting relationship by acting with kindness, warmth, and consideration toward everyone—including parents, grandparents, caregivers, co-workers, custodians, administrators, parents, guests, as well as any non-human visitor in the classroom! 

Quality interactions include providing routines that offer consistency and predictability help children feel secure and develop confidence to venture and explore their world and relationships. We can be role models for empathy and consideration for others. We can treat everyone in the classroom with respect and assume positive intent.

Our actions prove our recognition that everyone in the classroom has rights that need to be acknowledged and respected.

We are educating future leaders—we must model listening skills for them to emulate.

Step 2: Environmental Safety

Creating safe spaces designed for children includes using visual, tactile, auditory, and olfactory cues to ensure an environment optimal for quality interactions.

Visually, it helps to see things from their viewpoint. Are essential items within their reach? Are pictures, posters, and any other art placed on walls at their eye-level? Conversely, is everything potentially dangerous tucked away?

Basics include child-sized furniture that is free of sharp edges, giving children safe and inviting seating for their small bodies. Have we arranged our rooms so there is plenty of space for active bodies to move around, dance, and play? Are there cozy spaces to curl up and read?

If we have any control over it, we can consider lighting. How can we maximize natural light? Can we ask our institutions to choose warm (incandescent bulbs) over cool lighting? 

A diverse classroom will include students with varying capability to weather loud noises and strong smells. Considering their needs will result in a more pleasant environment for everyone. 

What are some auditory considerations we can include?

• Sound-absorbing materials such as rugs and pillows
• Closed window curtains or blinds to help when outside noise is a strong disturbance
• Felt or cork board on the walls to absorb sound
• Felt tips on the bottom of chairs and tables to provide a buffer from contact with the floor.

Many students (and adults) are sensitive to strong smells and this can affect behavior in a classroom. How can we help make our environment fragrance-free? Many classrooms today are choosing unscented cleaning solutions and toiletries and asking employees to avoid personal sprays and perfumes. Finally, don’t forget to make sure the trash bin is securely covered and emptied frequently!

Step 3: A Warm Reception

A sense of belonging begins at the door. 

Imagine approaching a home where you don’t know anyone and being greeted at the door with a wide smile and an effusive, “Hello, welcome! I’m so glad you are here!” It does a great job in setting the tone, right? 

Guiding children in those first few minutes will help them get comfortable in their new environment. Have someone show where their belongings are stored, coats hung up, and let them explore their new surroundings.

Perhaps there is a table with manipulatives where they can play side-by-side with other children without pressure to communicate. Maybe a student ambassador? All of these will help to ensure an ideal environment for quality interactions.

Learn to say hello and goodbye in the languages your students speak, and over the course of the year, teach those words and others to all students.

Provide a diverse range of materials including books, posters, blocks, and art supplies that visualize multiple languages along with traditional and newer crafts and celebrations to foster a warm, friendly, representative-of-all environment.

Step 4: Communicating as Equals

As educators, our goal is to foster positive and respectful communication between every member of the classroom through quality interactions. To help achieve this it’s helpful to understand co-regulation. 

As adults, we manage difficult emotions in healthy ways by exercising, talking to a friend or therapist, resting or relaxing, or simply taking time away for ourselves to reflect and process. 

Since this capability is something children have yet to develop, we can be role models in recognizing our feelings and modeling regulation. Meeting children where they are with calm sensitivity and assuring them that their feelings are valid will help them process their emotions to feel better.

“At its heart, co-regulation is connecting with a child who’s in distress and being able to evaluate what that child needs in the moment to help calm themselves.”

Lauren Marchette, child, adolescent, and family psychologist and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Are we talking to children, or with them? Studies show that in an Early Childhood Education (ECE) environment, more teacher talk time involves directives rather than interactive conversation, resulting in less-developed language and a smaller vocabulary.

Exhibiting curiosity, asking discovery questions, paraphrasing, suggesting, summarizing, and affirming a child’s feelings expands a child’s literacy and language. Acknowledging and naming emotions, waiting, watching, listening and reflecting on their responses helps social and emotional development. 

Children who are still learning and expanding their vocabulary naturally turn to behavioral methods of communication. When adults can remember that every behavior—positive or negative—invokes a need, we can better direct our response.

Step 5: Instruction

The four previous building blocks center on creating connections to foster social, emotional, and language development for the best possible quality interactions.

Our fifth block expands upon the foundation we’ve laid through trust, safety, warmth, and communication by adding instructional techniques for building emergent literacy. Intentional literacy instruction helps children learn to read and write, further expanding their cognitive capabilities and means of expression. 

A variety of strategies to impart literacy skills exist that naturally build quality interactions and are drawn from the four previous essentials. When educators use embedded, intentional strategies and exchanges throughout daily activities such as scheduled playtime, meal time, and transitions, they are reinforcing routines that build trust. 

When surroundings are accessible and considerate of all of the senses, they promote relaxed environments that allow learning with ease. A classroom that represents the diversity of its inhabitants through material objects and spoken word is a literacy-rich environment that encourages curiosity and promotes empathy. 

Educators who communicate through frequent conversation and open-ended questions, and respond to challenging behavior with respect and empathy, set the tone for quality instruction.

Given that there are many specific and strategic quality instruction techniques, we can look forward to revisiting the topic of quality interactions and exploring it more fully in future blogs.

Related:

Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood

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Positive Words

 POSITIVE WORDS CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Using positive words when speaking to a child who needs correction can make such a difference!

From: https://www.weareteachers.com/positive-language-in-the-classroom/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFoM2xleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHWRuyIJ2Q0zu-uId_6dZ1j7fDbuxjkzzHg5vX8GEFsRgl6oTZxsbf98T_w_aem_vg0Pa36PHwjdtzpXWwGH-w

 

 

 

Essential Skills (from Learning Ladder)

Ways to Help Elementary Students Self -Regulate: Edutopia

From: https://www.edutopia.org/article/elementary-student-strategies-for-self-regulation?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=BTS+24&utm_id=BTS24&utm_term=self-regulate&utm_content=feature&fbclid=IwY2xjawErmzhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHX-ADHT7lxI0lWnrk9mRKzWrbAjf6we3fPOB7Y0w_PBCs17z5Uz236_heg_aem_oxZcJWjdILwP631VuFbkmw

Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

19 Ways to Help Elementary Students Self-Regulate

These strategies can help young learners practice an essential life skill—and foster classroom harmony in the process.

By Daniel Leonard

August 7, 2024

School is all about giving students the skills they need to succeed. That certainly applies to reading, writing, and math, but there’s a growing understanding among elementary teachers that schools should also be teaching a more fundamental skill: self-regulation. 

“I found that thinking about behavior objectively—as a skill to be taught rather than simply as good or bad—was immensely helpful in my ability to guide children in learning to control their behavior,” writes special education teacher Nina Parrish.

There are a variety of proactive steps that can help keep students composed. Regularly checking in with kids—and building relationships with them—can increase their sense of safety in the classroom and give them an opportunity to share how they’re feeling, writes educator and principal Jasmine Brann. Plus, sticking to routines and simplifying your classroom expectations can decrease the risk of outbursts born from frustration or confusion, write education researchers Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers.

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But even with these proactive practices in place, young students with still-developing brains can struggle to control their own reactions. Here are some teacher-tested strategies that can help endow elementary students with the essential, lifelong skill of self-regulation.

Teach kids about their brains: To better regulate themselves, kids need to understand what’s going on inside their heads. Educator Kathryn Fishman-Weaver recommends teaching the basic structure and function of the limbic system—the brain’s emotional control center. She uses a mnemonic device she developed to help kids distinguish different parts of the system: Hippos’ teeth have awful odor (hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and olfactory bulb). Fishman-Weaver says this crash course helps kids realize not that emotions and thinking are separate processes, but rather that “feelings, thoughts, and behaviors lead to coordinated responses across the brain” that can affect students’ attention span, memory, and executive functioning.

Develop emotional vocabulary: To understand and discuss their emotions, kids need a wider emotional vocabulary, too. Fishman-Weaver challenges students to perform “feeling brainstorms,” in which they’re tasked to “think of 20 types of happy or sad.” As they generate more words and share them among each other, it’s more likely that they’ll begin to use more precise words to describe their own emotions in the future—like “anxious,” “excited,” or “satisfied.” Once students have a healthy emotional vocabulary, tools like mood meters, emotion wheels, and mood scales can help them track how their emotions change day-to-day.

Chat it out with a stuffed animal—or a plant: If students are feeling stressed, they may need to talk through their feelings—but it’s not always necessary that a human be the one listening. When educator and assistant professor of education Lori Desautels’ elementary school gave students stuffed animals to care for and chat with, “we observed a calm in many students that we had not seen before.” Similarly, a pineapple plant (nicknamed Patricia) in Lisa Tiemersma’s fourth-grade class helped calm kids down who were upset and cheer up kids who were sad.

Create a peace corner: At Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville, every classroom has a designated “peace corner”—a space for kids who need to self-regulate, filled with a bean bag chair, sensory toys, stuffed animals, and charts describing calming breathing and counting exercises. Students choose when to go to the corner, and their teacher sets a five-minute timer, but the student can request more time if needed. “I’ve seen a lot of my kids this year—instead of just exploding or getting really upset—say ‘OK, I need to go to the peace corner,’” says fourth-grade teacher Whitney Holland.

Use choice time: Free choice time, when structured well, can help students learn self-regulatory skills. For example, at Charter Oak International Academy in West Hartford, Connecticut, kids can go to various areas of the classroom during free time (like “blocks” or “dramatic play”)—but if that area is at capacity, they can put their name on a waiting list. Students can ask their teacher to set a timer for when they’ll be allowed to switch into the area— “and having that visual of the time getting less and less” allows them to develop their patience, says pre-K teacher Cindy Barron.

Measure the size of a problem: To many young kids, every problem can feel huge, and therefore deserving of a huge reaction. Teachers can help students put things into perspective. For example, Washington elementary teacher Anna Parker has students rate problems—like “Someone took your pencil” and “A family member is in the hospital”—on a scale from 1 to 5 and reflect on what the appropriate response to each might be. Parker discusses calibrating responses throughout the year “so that students in the moment will think, ‘I can take a second, then I can react appropriately.’”

Use picture books: Picture books can help kids learn about emotions and how to deal with them. Educator Kristin Rydholm recommends books like Big Feelings, which “identifies and addresses the intense emotions that children sometimes experience when attempting to work collaboratively.”

Morning check-ins: Quick check-ins at the beginning of the day can help students reflect on what they’re feeling. Ask students to share one “rose” (something they’re excited about) and one “thorn” (something they’re worried or upset about), says educator Alex Venet. UCLA Graduate School of Education instructor Rebecca Alber suggests asking students to describe how they’re feeling in a single word. They might start with words like “good” or “bad,” but with more development of their emotional vocabulary, they might progress to “anxious” or “serene.”

Picture your peaceful place: A moment of mindful meditation can help kids regulate themselves. When kids are overcome by their feelings, occupational therapist Lauren Brukner recommends asking them to close their eyes and “visualize a moment or place that makes them feel the most peaceful,” like a specific room in their house or playing with a particular toy. Picturing every detail—every sound, every smell—can help calm students who are “feeling high levels of emotionality.”

Relaxing body movements: Stretching, bending, and balancing exercises provide sensory input that can help regulate strong emotions, Brukner says. During a transition period in class, for example, ask students to stand straight, then “use your right arm to help you bend your left knee toward your shoulder, and hold this position for five seconds,” before repeating it with the left arm and right knee. Desautels writes that telling students to clench and release the muscles in their hands and faces can have a similar effect.

Write down your values: When a person takes some time to reflect on and write down their core values, research shows this “improves self-esteem, executive function, and inhibitory control,” Brukner writes. She asks students to write down “10 things that define who you are and make you special.” Writing this list helps kids self-regulate in the moment, but Brukner also recommends that students keep it somewhere close so they can refer to it throughout the year, “such as next to your bed or pinned up in your workspace.” Similarly, Desautels asks students to reflect on the “anchors” in their life that stabilize them—people they care about and trust, calming places, or pets. Students can return to this list of anchors—to add to it, or just read over it—whenever they’re feeling overwhelmed.

Leverage the power of nature: Connecting kids with the natural world has wide-ranging mental benefits, research shows—including less overall stress. “If your school doesn’t have easy access to nature, you can still help students experience the magic of nature in many ways,” write Tiemersma and Brown—like growing an avocado plant from its pit, starting a school garden with calming aromatic herbs, or hanging a bird feeder near your window and tracking what different species visit it.

Positive self-talk: Students’ stress often derives from feeling like they’re not good enough—or simply unable to accomplish a given task. Teaching them to develop the habit of positive self-talk in the face of challenges can help. “Tell your students that when they have a negative thought about themselves, they can replace it with an affirmation,” suggests Brukner—like “I can totally do this!” or “I can feel proud that I’m trying my best!”

Simple breathing exercises: Breathing exercises have a calming effect, making them a great tool for self-regulation. Brukner recommends telling students, “Breathe in through your nose slowly for 4 seconds, hold, then breathe out through your mouth slowly for 6 seconds.” As an add-on, Desautels asks students to put one hand on their stomach and one hand in front of their nose: As they breathe in; they feel their stomach expand, and as they breathe out, they feel warm air hit their hand. Prompt students to “exhale away” any negative thoughts they might be feeling, Desautels says.

Sensory brain breaks: Quick brain breaks focused on sensory activities allow students to process what they’ve learned—and reduce stress, Desautels says. Here are some examples:

• Name Scribbles: Have students write their name four times with their dominant hand and four times with the other hand. Afterward, discuss how it felt; which was more difficult? Why?
• The Junk Bag: Desautels has a bag full of junk drawer items—shoelaces, markers, a can opener, etc. She picks an item from the bag and asks students to come up with two ways the object could be used outside of its intended purpose. They can write or draw their answers.
• Invisible Pictures: Pair off students, and have one draw a picture in the air while the other guesses what it is. To narrow the guessing, you can give a category like “food” or “places.”

Calming sounds: Desautels uses a variety of effective sounds in her classroom—rain sticks, bells, chimes, peaceful music—but her go-to is the Tibetan singing bowl. Sitting in a circle and breathing deeply, “students close their eyes and listen to the tone until they can’t hear it any longer,” she writes. “When this happens, they raise their hands in the air.”

Express emotions with art: Artistic activities can help kids process and express emotions, as well as “create a sense of safety and comfort, reducing stress,” writes Desautels. In one activity, she gives students a piece of paper and prompts them to fill it with various colors, lines, and shapes. She then asks students: Which color is angry? Which shape feels left out? Which lines are worried? And why? “You can ask students how their images are like them and how they are different.”

Self-regulating games: Many games require players to exhibit restraint, which can help kids develop discipline over their bodies and brains. For example, games like Red Light, Green Light and Freeze “require participants to exert self-control,” write Wilson and Conyers.

Create time to discuss: Even if you feel like you’ve given your students all the tools they need to self-regulate, some kids are bound to have difficulties. In those cases, it’s helpful to make time to chat with students one-on-one. “Kids need objective, nonjudgmental feedback in order to improve their behavior,” says Parrish. “When a problem arises, find a calm time to discuss what went wrong, why, and how it can be handled differently next time.”

 

Setting the Tone for the First Lesson of the Year: Edutopia

 From: https://www.edutopia.org/article/setting-tone-first-lesson-year-high-school?fbclid=IwY2xjawErmz1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHeOm7_ZzvOjSNHrlr9nUj6b5XEQQ0UMDqjUvRw9NL3fc5jC8ZKg-rA07xg_aem_XDQVbvdh3h7Nfq7WB_3KjQ

 

Teaching Strategies

Setting the Tone for the First Lesson of the Year

To start the academic year off well, approach your high school students in ways that make them feel seen and create excitement about the subject matter.

By Andrew Atherton

July 25, 2024

monkeybusinessimages / iStock

There are few lessons as special as the first lesson of a new academic year. While success in teaching happens in the aggregate—and is rarely derailed by any single lesson, even those we feel could have gone better—the very first lesson feels a little different. This is because it is different. 

The first lesson is an opportunity to welcome our students to our classrooms and to share with them the excitement (and trepidation) of a new academic year. It’s an opportunity to get to know our students and for them to get to know us. We set the tone for the year by beginning to build the routines and habits that shape our classrooms. What we do in this first lesson reverberates in all of those that follow. 

In this article, I’ll outline four of my best strategies for getting the most out of your first lesson. Whether you’re teaching an entirely new class for the first time or rejoining a class that you taught last year, these strategies are sure to set you and your students up for success. 

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1. Meet Them at the Door

Make sure that you’re waiting at the door of the classroom to greet your new students. As they arrive, say hello to each student personally, asking for their name if you haven’t taught the class before. Direct them to head into the classroom and to find their desk, which you should label beforehand.  

There are a few reasons for doing this: 

• Most obviously and fundamentally, it gives you the opportunity to acknowledge each student personally. It tells them that they matter to you and creates, from the first second, an inclusive and welcoming space. They are seen and they matter. 
• If you’re asking for their name, it gives students the chance to tell you how they prefer to be known. Often, a name as it appears on a register is not the student’s preference. Jot down what they say on the class roster (which I have with me on a clipboard) so that you can begin to address them in the manner they prefer as soon as the lesson begins. 
• A more practical reason for meeting students at the door is to control the flow of entry into the classroom. It means the door doesn’t become a bottleneck and students will enter, one by one, in a calm and orderly fashion. 

2. Give Students Something to Think About 

If you’re waiting at the door for students to enter, this means you’re not in the classroom teaching. Make sure that there is something on the desk for students to complete. It should be self-explanatory and self-contained so students don’t feel the need to get back up and ask you a question. While they’re working on this, you can continue to greet students as they arrive. 

My preference for this first task is either a retrieval activity from the last academic year (so long as I am confident that they will know it) or a list of some books I read over summer, with space for students to write down what they read and/or what they most enjoyed about your subject in the previous year. 

3. Make Names a Priority 

Aiming to learn the names of your students as quickly as possible is always one of my top priorities. It helps to build a strong relationship with the class, but also, just as important, it enables a whole host of routines I rely on in my teaching. It is hard to cold call if you don’t know the name of the person you wish to ask. 

The important work of learning names begins in the first lesson. Keep your clipboard with you during the lesson (with their preferred names now added), and make a conscious effort to refer to it during questioning. Let students know this is what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Invite them to correct you anytime you get a name wrong. At the end of the first lesson, I always make a big deal of moving around the room and trying to name every student correctly. I don’t always get this right, but it’s surprising to find how quickly you can do it. 

4. Make the Subject Matter 

As well as sending a signal that each student matters as an individual, you also want them to understand that your subject matters. It’s why you’re all gathered together, after all. Therefore, make sure that you always begin with something that’s academically substantive. 

In my own subject of English, I always begin by teaching a poem. It is discrete and exemplifies many of the skills that characterize the overall discipline; I’m able to build a quick snapshot of the class’s current ability in order to inform future planning; and it allows plenty of scope for rich and interesting discussion.  

During the discussion, continue to systematically use and rehearse student names, but also begin to introduce students to high-leverage routines you know you’re likely to use a lot: turn and talk, cold call, mini-whiteboards. As you do it for the first time, narrate what you’re doing and how you’d like the routine to work in all future lessons. 

The first lesson matters, and you can ensure that it does in all the right ways. Set the tone you want to permeate all the lessons that will follow it: inclusive and purposeful, welcoming and rigorous.

 

 From: https://www.education.com/worksheet/article/all-about-me-graphic-organizer/?utm_campaign=resource&utm_content=1723566035&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=facebook,twitter&fbclid=IwY2xjawErm71leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHc0TtJsZtU_XuK2s4K1Lua8NI4qR168LbjNNQLvglNp_eQ4Vre8j6uy8qA_aem_KaoJcUH9CW-hpIEB5bxytw

 Worksheet

All About Me: Graphic Organizer

Introduce yourself—and get to know others—with this fun questionnaire! Students will complete 11 different prompts in which they will be asked to share some of their favorite things, identify hobbies and areas of interest, and include other interesting tidbits about themselves. Designed primarily for middle schoolers, this versatile one-page worksheet can be used as a back-to-school project, a social emotional learning (SEL) activity, or as an icebreaker activity in a variety of settings. Alternatively, this All About Me graphic organizer would serve as a great pre-writing template for an autobiographical essay.

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Seasonal

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Back to School

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