September 17, 2016
It’s so great to be back to school! I love the first day of school!! It never
ceases to amaze us how children can grow so much in such a short period of
time! This year Wellness class will be taught by myself with the help of the classroom teachers.
In our first wellness classes of the year we talked about our own feeling
about starting a new school year. The
students expressed varying levels of readiness, mixed feelings, and excitement
about seeing friends and being in new classrooms. Many of them were feeling
normal levels of anxiety as well, as reported by their parents after classroom
drop off!
We address issues around initial anxiety
right from the beginning of the year: naming feelings, understanding the
reasons for those feelings, and finding various ways to cope with them. In our wellness
classes, the teachers are I are hoping to expand on the children’s “feelings
vocabulary”, so they will be better able to identify the subtleties between
such feelings as “disappointment” and “frustration”. The ability to do
this enables the adoption of the most appropriate strategy when needed.
Last fall, we were fortunate to have Marc Brackett (Director of the
Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence) speak to our faculty about his RULER
approach to Social Emotion Learning. He
used the RULER is an acronym which refers to the 5 components of the program,
which align closely to ours here at Berwick. His
emphasis on the importance of emotional intelligence and self-regulation will
be addressed in various ways throughout the year.
In Kindergarten, we read the book: The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. We asked the students if they had any of the
same feeling that were in this book. We
processed “back to school” feelings by labeling the emotions and what we could
do when we feel them. We play a movement
game that the students acted out how these emotions made their bodies feel.
In first grade,
we read the book The Pout-Pout Fish Goes to School by Deborah Diesen. The fish in this story had a great start to
his day and then lost his way around school and was feeling sad and
disappointed. We talked about his body
language and once he found the right classroom, how his self-esteem and confidence improved.
In second grade,
we process our “back to school” feeling by labeling the physical underpinnings
of emotions, and what we can do when we feel them. The students showed by putting butterflies on
different body parts where they had these feeling.
They also found words that described how they felt and put them on the
poster.
Processing feelings in the 3rd Grade was be done through discussions
of where emotions are in our body, as well as how we deal with them in
appropriate and meaningful ways. The students did an activity where they had to
run and get an emotion word from one side of the gymnasium and act it back to their
partner on the other side.
In the 4th Grade,
the discussions and recording of feelings under various circumstances will be
done initially in pairs, as students exchange ideas and thoughts about the beginning of school. The goal of this is to have the students validate each
other’s’ anxieties, fears, or excitement, and establish common solutions for
how to deal with them. The students
watched two clips from the Disney’s Pixar movie Inside Out and had great
discussions about how Riley felt in the movie and if they had any of the same
feelings.
We are providing an
environment for the children to learn and care for themselves and for each
other with empathy and compassion.
The Lower School teachers and I are excited to be able to combine social
emotional learning with physical movement, mindfulness and yoga this year. All
of these will contribute to the “whole child” approach to learning, which BA is
dedicated to providing for our children!
