Welcome Back! September 2016

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.We also included talking to a trusted person about our feeling. We also are incorporating the Yoga 4 Classrooms relaxation techniques for self-regulation with mountain pose and balloon breathes. 

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 3^rd 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 4^th 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!