Beyond Behavior Management Second Edition By: Jenna Bilmes

This summer I chose Jenna Bilmes’ book “Beyond Behaviour Management (2ndedition)” as my professional reading book. In this book Jenna talks about the six life skills children need to be successful in school and life. The six skills are: attachment, belonging, self-regulation, collaboration, contribution and adaptability.

Key components and strategies:

1. Attachment: Any close, ongoing relationship that the child has with one or more adults inside and outside the home (pg. 6).

Children who have healthy relationship with their adults they:

• Look to them for love & affection.
• Depend on them for safety and security.
•  Count on them for knowledge, wisdom & guidance.
• Accept their help & comfort.

Three strategies to help strengthen your attachment to children:

• Get to know children well.

- What are the family’s expectations for their child?

- What do they see their child’s strengths & challenges?

- Who is this child?

- Include personal bits in your conversations with children (ex. “Good morning. Is your nana still visiting at your house?)

•  Interact with affection:

- Treating children with love & affection, regardless of their behaviour, will make your job as a teacher easier.

- When dealing with challenging behaviour make it clear to everyone in the room that you like that child, at the same time show that your intention is to keep all the children safe.

- Don’t alienate the child either from yourself or from others in the classroom.

• Recognize “insides.”

- When greeting/talking with children, emphasize character traits (ex. “Good morning. I feel happy when I see your big smile.”)

Notes when absent: Joanna recommends leaving a note for students to make them feel safe and secure as finding a substitute teacher can be traumatizing for some kids. Have the guest teacher post the note at students’ eye level so they can refer it when needed.

“Come” a magic word: Use “come” instead of “go” when you see a child beginning to spin out of control. Say: “Come sit by me” or “Come hold my hand” instead of “go sit there” etc. This makes the situation expected not forced.

Guiding children after they’ve made a mistake: move close to the child, get down to his/her level, and speak quietly so that you & the child can hear what is being said.

Large group instructions: Limit these to once or twice a day for only fifteen minutes or so.

Examples of activities to support attachment:     

• Sportscasting – imagine yourself as an announcer at an event.
•  Rest time – Use a singsong voice and chant things that the child has done throughout the day. Sing the chorus section of “You Are My Sunshine” while rubbing or patting his/her back.
•  Baby games – These games are effective if a child is having a bad day or is beginning to show signs of stress or falling apart. 

                          - Tickle bug

                          - Peekaboo

                          - This little piggy

                          - One, Two, Three, Jump

• Nurturing activities:

                         - Lotion Table

                         - Nail painting

                         -  Owie table

Think about it:

Think back to your childhood: Who do you remember as a key adult in your life? What fond memories pop into your mind when you think about that adult? For me it’s my mom and dad. I remember myself lying down on the carpet while my head resting on my mom’s lap. She would gently move her fingers in my hair and sing our traditional lullaby. I also remember having small walks with my dad and talk to him about my day while he would listen and smile, responding to my questions and wonderings.

Planned and purposeful talk

COLLAPSEWhat aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire? 

What aspects of oral language development are essential for young learners to acquire?

In early years children should be provided with ample opportunities to orally communicate with each other. We can’t expect the children to use proper tone of voice or different gestures and body language, if we don’t explicitly teach and introduce them to these social conventions. In North American culture maintaining eye contact is consider important, while in some cultures like in South-East Asia direct eye contact with your adults while talking to them is considered disrespectful. Therefore, teaching the acceptable behaviour of our society is important and teaching them in early years will help them learn the norm from the beginning.

As early years educators, we should expose our students to these skills by carefully planning the program that allows the children to explore language and to communicate their thinking and learning in meaningful ways. Educators should listen to their students attentively and observe children’s responses and interactions. They can guide oral language development by providing models of richer responses to guide children’s thinking, and by introducing new vocabulary, by using different tone of voice while reading aloud and modeling during play-based learning time in centres like dramatic play. All these modeling and exposure will help build the foundation needed to develop oral language skills in early years.

Think-Pair-Share

We use think-pair-share in our classroom, however we call it Elbow Partner Talk. I believe this is a great strategy to support oral language because students take turns to both be a speaker and a listener. We ask our students to close their eyes and think about what they are going to say to themselves first, after 30 seconds we ask them to turn to their elbow partner and talk. They take turns to share their ideas and thinking after more or less a minute or so, we start counting down from five to zero, this is the warning for students to finish their sentence and turn and face the teacher. Almost all the time whenever we’ve used this strategy we have most of our students put up their hands to share their thinking and ideas. This strategy gives them a chance to express their thinking and listen to someone else’s thinking before they can share to the whole class. It’s less stressing to say something that’s on your mind to one person than to speak in front of the whole class. I believe that this strategy helps build up students confidence to speak in front of large crowd.

Self Regulatiion

Self-Regulation

COLLAPSE

J.P. is touching anchor chart on the wall, S.S. is playing with his shoes, K.W. is looking around, while M.D. is trying to explain how he can make shadows big and small during our Learning Circle. Why can’t these kids focus and listen to what M.D. is eagerly trying to share? 

This kind of questions used to bother me until I read and saw the videos on Self-regulation. Some of my students are not able to regulate their behaviour nor are they aware of or able to respond to the feelings of others. Dr. Shankar would argue that these kids are not “able to adjust their body and mind to attain and maintain the optimal state of arousal for a task or situation.”

When I think about it now, I feel I have more work to do to learn the reasons behind my student’s behaviour. Instead of labeling them as hyperactive, I should find out why they behave the way they do. Why are they anxious and what are those triggers? The other thing I can do is to rethink my Learning Circle and sharing time. Is it important for me to have all the students on the carpet or this sharing can be done in small groups and with the kids who really want to learn about the topic. My goal should be to make all the students feel successful at the end of the day and by adjusting and rethinking my practices, I think I should be able to help my students self-regulate and be successful. 

Say no to worksheets

I'm taking Kindergarten AQ course and I've learned a lot from the resources and discussions that we are engaged in. One of our topics was "The worksheets dilemma". Here is what I learned and think...

- Worksheets are teacher centered not child centered – The kindergarten classrooms should be child centered and not teacher centered. Worksheets only satisfy the urge that teachers have to have a tangible assessment so he/she can share with the parents.

- Worksheets always have one right answer – In the play-based and inquiry-based classrooms there are many ways to get to an answer. Each child thinks differently and will come up with different solution. Therefore, giving them a worksheet does not fulfill this kind of program.

- Worksheets are not differentiated – In order to reach every child in our classrooms; we thrive for differentiating for our students and provide scaffolding to help them move forward. Whereas, worksheets have the same content for each and every student and does not help to meet the needs of ALL the students.

- Products vs. Process – Play-based and Inquiry-based programs are geared towards process of learning and worksheets are all about the final product. In the play/inquiry-based program process is important and it helps enter these plays and inquiries at students readiness and interest levels.

- Worksheets are not developmentally appropriate – Worksheets tells us what a child knows at the given point it does not gives us a whole picture. In doing so it takes away opportunities for oral communication, their imagination and creativity, problem-solving skills, collaboration, and the use of their senses.

Play-Based learning...

"Play nourishes every aspect of children’s development – it forms the foundation of intellectual, social, physical, and emotional skills necessary for success in school and in life. Play ‘paves the way’ for learning." (Canadian Council on Learning, 2006)

I believe that Kindergarten years are very crucial for children's development and play plays a very important role. Our schedule allows us to have these uninterrupted play-based learning time twice a day for an hour each. At first, I use to think that my students are just wasting their time, but when I started engaging with them and participating with them, it started to make more sense. The children were not just playing, they were using their oral language to communicate with their peers, solving problems, doing math, writing and much more!

I started taking lots of pictures and started documenting and writing quotes. Now my students ask me to come and take pictures so they can talk about it later. It's fascinating how they remember what they were doing and can recall what they were doing even the next day.

Here are some of the pictures of play-based learning from my classroom...

Desert by C.T & W.H. (Sand Table)

Marble Run designed and built by: K.P. & L. W.

My Castle. By: S.S.

Hospital By: L.W.

Princess Castle By J.Z., M.H., S.B. & C.T

Pirate Ship - By: K.P., D,P., E.W., A.B. S.J. & W.N.

Car Tunnel - By: L.W., E. W. & M.J.

Rhyming Words and Word Wall Words - By: J.Z.

Several students worked on this building using straw connectors.

My House - By: L.W.

Bird House - By: J.P.

School - By: M.J. & A.B.

Beautiful Day - By: J.Z.

Pond & Flowers - By: M.H.

Mario's Car - By: J.P. & K.W.

Short Tower & Plan - By: J.P.

Experimenting with Balance Scale

Gift for mom

Which is your favourite cookie? By: L. W.

Material List - By: K.P. & L.W.

Writing our friends names

We wonder if the snow is clean for us to eat? Survey By: M.D. & D.P.

My Inspirations...

I've been following these wonderful ladies for more than a year now. I've been inspired by their work and the work that they are doing in the area of early learning. I can spend hours on these two blogs and learn new things every time I visit them. These two wonderful ladies are Joanne M. Babalis and Jocelyn Schmidt. If you visit my classroom, you'll see that some areas of my classroom are the reflection of their classrooms.

This is my second year in Full-Day Kindergarten and therefore, I am always looking for ideas and practices that I can use to change and improve to help my students' learning, as well as my own professional learning. I'm always looking for PD opportunities to help improve my teaching and browse the web for innovative ideas and strategies. Joanne and Jocelyn have motivated me and have helped me to look at Early Learning through a different lens.

When I started my career as a Kindergarten teacher last year, I was exposed to the world of Inquiry-Based learning. I had no idea about this new pedagogy. So I started my own professional development. I read several articles and browsed several websites and came across Joanne's website. Her journey of transforming her classroom motivated me to do things differently. Her enthusiasm of learning and helping other Early Learning (EL) teachers is contiguous. She blogs about her professional learning and the learning of her students in a way which helps new teachers like me to try things differently.

During my exploration and learning about Inquiry-based learning I also came across Jocelyn's website. Just like Joanne, she has inspired and motivated me in my journey of becoming a better EL educator. I was struggling with the partnership that we are required to have with our ECEs (Early Childhood Educators) and Jocelyn's professional reflection about this very topic helped me improve the relationship and partnership with my ECE.

I'm very lucky to have these unofficial mentors in my life! These two ladies have been my inspiration and I know that they've inspired many more teachers like me who are seeking some help in the area of Early Learning. Thank you ladies for taking time out of your busy schedule to write about yours and your students' journey!