May is Mental Health Awareness Month

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I almost didn’t start writing this post because I don’t know what to say or recommend. While these ideas from a previous post still stand, none of them can combat the serious issues teachers and students (and families) especially are facing after over two years of intense challenges and tragedy. So many families are struggling with grief, teacher stress and burnout is rampant, and new guidelines recommend that all children 8 and older should be screened for anxiety due to pandemic effects.

None of my suggestions or ideas can “fix” this situation. So many factors are outside of our control, but what you can try to do is take care of yourself as much as possible. If that means taking a break from teaching or looking at a new school or new role, so be it. During the worst part of the pandemic for me, I found taking short walks outside could help me get through the day, but a lot of the issues affecting schools and teachers are structural and cannot be improved by taking walks, deep breaths, journaling, or something similar. As teachers, we are wired to frequently feel guilty about not doing enough for our students, but you cannot care for your students if you are not in a good situation. This probably means many teachers will leave this year. I personally have been thinking a lot about teaching private school versus public school and how the pandemic intensified the inequities in such a stark way. 

What we can do with students is talk about mental health and give them the space and vocabulary to share their feelings. As an adult, I feel stigma related to mental health challenges and the pressure to be positive even in very challenging situations. We can try to help our students avoid this same fate in the future by emphasizing that mental health is part of our overall health, asking for help is brave and vital, and giving students processes and words to try to express themselves. In the past, we had a lot of success with creating writing process maps with students and found that students who had self described anxiety or frustration around writing benefited. I also try to remind my students of resources for when we are feeling down or want to talk to someone. I know many schools don’t have resources for students other than teachers or family members, but if you are lucky enough to work at a school with a counselor or social worker, try to normalize asking them for help in a variety of situations.

I’ve witnessed really productive discussions by students about mental health and specifically how therapy helps them, mainly as a result of reading books with characters who see a therapist. Two that have really worked for my students are the Alvin Ho series by Lenore Look and Guts by Raina Telgemeier (all books listed are pictured above). Another one that I think would resonate with many students right now is Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh. I only recently read it and haven’t had the opportunity to share it with students yet. I could go on as there are so many books that might help students find words or parallels to share their feelings, but as every situation is different, so is each book. You can find more books that helped us in this regard in this previous post (also shared above). I’ve heard arguments that books about mental health difficulties are too “heavy” for children, but in my experience I’ve found students are more than capable of figuring out what books work for them and respond really well to books that they can genuinely relate to and might not always have a happy or neatly tied up ending.

For me, as much as teaching is challenging and at times during the past two years felt almost impossible (for example, teaching in person and on Zoom simultaneously before we had access to vaccinations), I did ultimately feel uplifted by the children. They can be so kind and so funny and sometimes that is enough to get you through the day. The back and forth nature of the year and responding to COVID scares meant that we were so excited to see each other when we could, and when we couldn’t, they were excited to see my baby over Zoom or show me their snacks, pets, toys, or other glimpses into their lives. 

Whatever your plans are for next year, you are so close to summer! Hang in there and I hope you can have some funny and joyful moments with your students in the next few weeks.

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Remote or Hybrid Learning Resources & Ideas

Sending love to teachers and families as we tackle yet another round of uncertainty and anxiety! I’m trying to take things one day at a time and remember that I’ve done this before when my students and I were not vaccinated. It seems like I will be in school in person with increased mitigation and vigilance. However, it also seems likely that some students and staff will need to stay home due to infection, so we may be teaching some students on Zoom and some in person at the same time. I experienced this set up for most of last year and found it to be the most difficult and least effective set up as it makes teaching and learning harder for everyone, but at least this time around it will be temporary and I have all my experience from last year to draw upon!

For those of you who are finding yourselves unexpectedly teaching online for the immediate future, here are some Remote Learning Ideas that I came up with when this all started in early March of 2020. After I taught online for some time, I came up with these Useful Virtual Tools that we depended upon daily as we made it through last school year.

One high success and meaningful activity that I always try to do with students in January is writing New Year’s Resolutions. This post is from back when I taught 5th grade, but here is a link to a video read aloud with some great ideas for younger students. This activity works well both in person or online (or a mix!) and you can provide an organized planner for your students, have them share orally, have them draw and write, or have them record a video (or more - the options are truly endless).  If your students are worried or anxious about the changing situation, new year’s resolutions could also be a way to address this as you work to brainstorm strategies and share information. There is so much that it is outside our control, but acknowledging uncertainty and students’ potential concerns about it often helps students feel seen and sometimes more secure.

Read alouds are always invaluable classroom tools, but they work really well for helping students talk about or process feelings. Sometimes younger students do better talking about how a character in a book might feel and suggesting strategies for that character. Also, read alouds work when all of your other technology fails and students can always do responses on paper even if they are online. There are some great picture book read alouds and more general tips in this post about Mental Health.

And of course, here are some ideas for Games to Play During Remote or Physically Distanced Learning! Games are a great way to do so many things and being online, distanced, or some combination of the two doesn’t mean that we have to stop having fun, bonding, and working together.

Hoping everyone got some time to relax, catch up on sleep, and feel more like themselves over the winter break.

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Mental Health!

I wanted to write this post in May for Mental Health Awareness Month, but clearly time has gotten away from me (yet again). Here is a post Gabby managed to write in a more timely fashion for Mental Health Awareness Month in the past! As we look toward the next school year with lots of uncertainty and anxiety inducing unknowns looming for most kids and teachers, here are some ways to support kids in managing their disappointment or anxiety about our unknown future. Please keep in mind that these are strategies to deal with uncertainty and anxiety, but NOT ways to handle grief or trauma.

Some things I tried that seemed to support my students this year:

• Talk about what you miss or would have done in more typical circumstances periodically. It’s okay to acknowledge disappointment and important to model expressing and thinking through emotions to students. Indulging in fantasy about what we might/could have done in other circumstances can make students feel better and help them get their feelings out. This isn’t something to do every single day, but periodically or around important milestones or holidays. (For example, I talked to my students about how I was disappointed about all of the restrictions during my son’s first Halloween, but I was looking forward to having him wear his costume during our party over Zoom). 

• Make up an alternate version of things as much as you can! Our Halloween party over Zoom was actually a huge success and a lot of fun. We also built “tents” in our homes and shared photos of them as an alternative to outdoor education/a camping trip. Try to continue traditions as much as you can, even if it means giving students and families the option to do things at home or on their own and share photos or stories.

• Try new ways to connect if you are getting tired of video chats or distanced, masked interactions. Ask students to write letters or design and write postcards. Or give students the option of sharing something about themselves in a creative way - they’ll come up with all kinds of ideas we would never think of!

• Sending photos or making videos when meeting in person isn’t an option. It is always a pick me up. My students were very motivated and cheered by videos or photos of my baby, and my co-teacher and I sent students a photo postcard so they could see our faces before school started since our traditional meet the teachers/see your classroom open house was cancelled. 

• Give students an opportunity to be creative! There is so much you can do with limited materials. We’ve used sheets of foil to make team or partner sculptures, or had partner creations (for example, someone draws and someone writes captions) that could be done in person/distanced or online.

• As always, find new ways to bring joy into class! Share something that made you smile and tie it into a sign in, response, greeting or something else. We used this “It’s an avocado, thanks!” video to talk about gratitude in the past, and my students also liked writing to my baby or writing a narrative to go along with a video of my baby. 

• And of course, powerful read alouds work for so many purposes! We read Hello Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly aloud to our class this year and students really responded to one of the characters being trapped, another character feeling unheard and misunderstood, and more. Using characters as a conduit is a great way to talk about our feelings. Other read alouds that I love in general, but also for talking about emotions are:

  • Front Desk by Kelly Yang: strong connections for students to learn about taking action when feeling powerless, fear, missing family, racism, discrimination, inequality, and more. This is another long chapter book read aloud, but definitely worth the time!

  • Saturday by Oge Mora is a gorgeous picture book and I’ve used it to talk to kids about managing disappointment

  • Carmela Full of Wishes by Matt de la Peña is another gorgeous picture book and deals with hope and loss, sibling relations, immigrant rights.

  • Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan. This lovely picture book caused intense reactions from my students and led to some powerful discussions, as well as being a great mentor text for descriptive writing. We also touched on managing disappointment, things being “unfair,” frustration with siblings, making kind choices, and different religions and family traditions.

  • Malaika’s Costume by Irene Luxbacher and Nadia L. Hohn is another beautiful picture book. Students connected with Malaika missing her mother, feeling disappointed, having money troubles, and eventually being creative and finding a solution that made everyone feel good. It could also inspire some costume making or other creativity!

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Mental Health Awareness Month

We feel so strongly about taking care of onself, putting your oxygen mask on first etc. We love the artists above and hope you check out their work as being supportive and encouraging of gentle and loving mental health. We hope this month you are (especially educators!!) taking some moments to take extra care of your mental health. Here are a few things that we do to support and facilitate taking care of ourselves in our little classroom community!

1. We do our best to model good habits with our students always.

One afternoon during pick up time a father said he would send me an email later. His daughter turned to him and said, "Oh, Dad, she doesn't answer emails after 4pm, she has a life!" And although the dad had a surprised reaction, it was refreshing to see a student who had understood boundaries and was happily chatting about them. We had indeed told the students that we love them dearly, AND just like we want them to go home and enjoy their family, hobbies and life-- we do the same and it actually helps us be the best teachers we can be (we reiterate points like this throughout the year).

Along this vein, we also  talk to students about work vs. home life (and their work email vs. personal emails -- see our technology post for tips on how to rollout computer use!).

2. Emotions Continuum, Naming feelings

We have an emotions continuum in the classroom that the students all made cards for at the beginning of this year. In our ideal world, we would have it hung up better (it is definitely falling down!) and we would add to it throughout the year as we learned more emotional vocabulary. In the mornings, students put their clothespin on how they are feeling (we had to remive 'tired' as it was always chosen). This is a nice non-verbal way for students to practice noticing their feelings, sharing them, and for us to see where a kid might be at.

We also often us the language, "I feel/I'm feeling … when....", when students are talking about a dilemma with a friend, or when we have circled back to a problem to practice sorting through, naming, and feeling through our feelings.

In 3rd grade, naming emotions and feelings is hard. Just noticing that a feeling is big, is a huge accomplishment and honestly, still an important life skill. We often say (as the adults, and now our students do, too), "I'm having a big feeling". Naming a feeling as big, is helpful, as a lot of the ways to work through a big feeling (sadness, anger or otherwise) can be similar.

We also use our Anger catchers, and silent signals as ways for students (or us!) to communicate our needs within a room full of other humans. Some students have personalized, more private ones, while there are also general ones (that mean things like, Water break, I'd like a fidget, or Stop, please!).

3. Books, books, books: Book clubs/ read alouds/ responses

Can you tell we would both live at a library if we could? Alas, they are so amazingly useful, though! Our read alouds are overflowingly full of opportunities to discuss how to take care of ourselves, others, or what to do when we (or someone else) doesn't feel well mentally or emotionally. Our read alouds this year that really supported our mental health work were: Out of My Mind, Rain, Reign, Save Me a Seat, and Hello Universe (among many others!). They led us to conversations about friendships, bullying, loneliness, and ultimately had us think a lot about: How we take care of ourselves? Others? What works? What doesn't?

We had written responses (this gave us time to practice our comprehension and cursive, too!) after almost every read aloud. These responses from the read aloud were just for teachers and the student, which gave it a bit of privacy and let students really reflect on connections to their own lives. Our students carry a lot on their shoulders and in their minds, and we found this time ended up being really important and supportive of their mental health.

Book clubs gave us a more intimate time to really think about ho we're feeling and how we relate to characters or messages in a text. We especially loved Alvin Ho (he has a therapist, has to practice talking out his feelings, and he reminds us it is important for dads to cry!). The book that brought up endless conversations about mental health was Every Living Thing, a somber collection of stories with tons to talk about (depression, caring for others, being lonely, anger, fear, how to heal etc..). Students blew us away in this book group, by the way they were willing to share about themselves and how they take care of themselves. It was nothing short of beautiful.

4. Unwinding-- Christie Zimmer makes great printables that we use for morning reflective work / afternoon unwinding. We also take daily breaks for wiggling or games (so many games in this classroom!), and team building. We make sure we have least some fun every single day.

5. Celebrate :).

We try to celebrate as much as possible! We celebrate our reading, our writing, how fast we did something in a timed challenge, that we found all the commas in the morning message-- it's fun to enjoy our little community. We've found that leaving the space to crack up about something that happened that was funny is such an important part of being together in a classroom... And it makes us all so happy.  

Graitutudes -- Part of our celebration work, is actually the celebration of others. We give 'kudos' every day for different things others do that we appreciate or find congratulatory, and it always makes us feel good to share our appreciation of others. Morning work in our room is often a thank you card to someone and the students love volunteering to be the one delivering these to people in our building. Now that we can see the end of the year in sight, we are astounded by how much our crew has grown. And we are sincerely grateful, we get to work hard, play hard, and grow with a ton of wonderful young humans. That is something worth celebrating!

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