emotional literacy Archives - Using Art Journals For Emotional Literacy

December 23, 2020January 26, 2021

How To Achieve A Culture of Peace in the Classroom | Montessori

“How can you achieve a culture of peace in your classroom?”

Imagine walking into a classroom. All the students are moving with purpose, care, and precision; there’s a quiet buzz of activity in the background and one adult is quietly assisting a child. This is the epitome of a Montessori classroom. This is what so many Montessorians envision when we imagine a peaceful classroom.

This is often referred to as a culture of peace.

A culture of peace does not just happen, it is achieved through an ongoing process. It requires planning, navigating, negotiating, and inner work.

Why a Culture of Peace is So Important in Today’s Classroom

Peace is a critical part of today’s classrooms. A “peace education” lays the foundation and builds the soul of our next generation. Teaching young children how to work together and interact in a kind, respectful manner that honors each individual in the community is the most important task any teacher, parent, or guardian is faced with. In order for peace to become habitual, we want to take advantage of the fact that during the formative years children are learning how to engage, interact, problem solve, and have empathy for others. By starting early, educators across the world can begin to sow the seeds for a peaceful world and society.

Creating peace in Your Montessori classroom goes beyond just teaching about it and reminding the children to “be kind” and “do the right thing.” As Montessori guides and parents, we need to take a step back and critically look at the process.

The first thing is that we need to do is to commit to making peace education a priority. For most of us, this is what attracted us to the Montessori practice in the first place—peace education.

How to Create a Culture of Peace in Your Classroom: Modeling Peace and Respect

Be the Peace

Be the peace you want to see from the children. Check your struggles at the door. All teachers have “stuff” that we are dealing with. It’s important that when you are with your students, you are FULLY present with them. You are there 100% and committed to them. This is the part of the “inner preparation” that Montessori talked about a lot. Preparing the environment begins with preparing yourself.

Ask yourself a few questions, what are you doing to take care of yourself so that you can be fully present? What kind of practices are you engaged in that will help preserve the sense of “peace” that you wish to create? Do you need to add or change anything? Are you taking care of ALL aspects of yourself, mind, body and spirit? We are ALL wired differently, and this practice comes easier for some than others, and that’s okay, it’s just up to you to figure out what works for you.

Remember, this is not always perfect, this practice is fluid, and it’s just that, a practice. This practice is the key to a peaceful classroom, because once you embody the peace within yourself, the energy you transmit will transcend the classroom.

Model Respect

Establishing RESPECT as a foundational governing principle in the classroom is paramount. If you want to create a culture of peace in your classroom, you should start with modeling the respect you want to see in the children.

Then, you can begin to have regular lessons, reminders, and examples of what respect is and what it looks like. The three basic rules of respect generally are: 1) Respect yourself, 2) respect others, and 3) respect the environment. Look for ways you can exhibit these rules—from quietly watching someone work, to holding the door for others, to picking up a piece of litter, to doing your best—and model those for your students.

A culture of peace does not happen overnight, nor is it ever perfect. As teachers and parents we are all faced with countless challenges—some which are within our control, and others beyond what we can control. The key to this is to focus on what you can do to create a culture of peace. This may be different every day, and you may have to start again each day, and yet, our children will continue to grow and learn, because that is what they are wired to do!

In Peace,
Kristen and Spramani

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August 7, 2020January 26, 2021

3-Step Guide to Helping Students Identify Their Feelings

How do you feel?

Most of us respond to this in a socially acceptable manner, “Fine, thanks and you?” When was the last time you heard someone reply truthfully, “I’m feeling a bit irritated right now,” or “I’m feeling optimistic.” Did you know that the average adult can only name between 3-5 feelings? Here are a few steps to help your students add a few more of those feelings into their vocabulary—and be able to identify when they’re feeling each one.

3-Step Guide to Helping Students Identify Their Feelings

Step One: Name it

Helping students to learn to identify their emotions begins with introducing them to a range of emotions. The age of the students in your classroom will determine how many feelings you introduce. With an early childhood group, we can begin with three emotions, and gradually move to six; help them understand what each emotion is by using photos, feelings books, emoji pillows, or just asking them to make a face! Assess your elementary students to determine how many they know and then maybe ask them to hunt for a few more (use a thesaurus).

Sometimes naming feelings can be complicated; to make it simple, you may need to begin with guiding the children to put emotions into one of two categories: “bad” or “good.” Is it making you feel “bad” or is making you feel “good?” Continue with asking questions for clarification to help them name that feeling.

Step Two: Feel it

Once we have helped our children name their feelings, now it’s time to discuss how humans experience feelings. This can be quite a delightful activity as your students role play, pantomime or get creative in their bodies to practice what being happy, sad, mad, or excited might look or feel like. If someone is feeling mad, maybe they need to go for a run around the playground as fast as they can go. If someone is feeling elated, maybe they need to tell a friend and jump up and down with excitement (you may need to invite them to go out in the hall or outside while you do this exercise!).

With older students, you can challenge them to think about what is going on INSIDE their body, is their heart beating faster, do they feel flush, do they feel butterflies in their stomach.

Step Three: Recognize it (in others)

Finally, engage your students in a conversation about empathy. How do you think others are feeling? Can you imagine yourself in a situation like this? When reading novels or stories to your students just pause and ask questions, a lot of questions. Keeping it real and relatable is the best way to get the point across.

When discussing empathy on an episode of NOVA, Jamil Zaki from Stanford University said,

“There’s psychological evidence from laboratory studies, that reading fiction can build our care, even for different groups of people, groups who we might not care that much about otherwise…You think of reading a novel as a very personal thing that’s just, ‘oh, you’re just, you know, sitting on your couch indulging in something.’ But no, you’re doing something a lot more profound. You’re, kind of, going to the empathy gym.”

While at times it may feel as if we are not making progress in developing empathetic children or compassionate communities, research has shown that we ARE evolving. As our brains are getting more compact, and skull size smaller, our sense of right or wrong, and ability to control impulses is getting better.

A Quick Tip

Marc Brackett’s book, Permission to Feel, has just been released in paperback. We highly recommend picking it up! His work at Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has outlined an effective plan for teachers to understand and then guide students in developing strong emotional intelligence.

Additional Resources

Dive Deeper

Guide to Helping Students Identify Their Feelings, stress

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By Spramani Elaun & Kristen Richter

June 20, 2020January 26, 2021

Tools to Help Montessori Students Manage Stress

As teachers and parents, it’s so important for us to help our kids manage their stress. Excessive stress can affect the way young students feel, think, and behave. Children learn how to respond to stress as they grow and develop, and if we give them healthy coping strategies now, we’re setting them up for emotionally literate, healthy futures.

Three Types of Stress

We often think of stress as “bad,” but there’s more to it than that. There’s actually three different types of stress we face as humans.

Acute Stress – This kind of stress comes as a surprise and will often trigger our fight, flight, or freeze response.
Chronic Stress – Our body isn’t designed for chronic stress; it activates the amygdala but doesn’t give a chance to relax, meaning we’re constantly in a stressed-out state. This may result in us feeling negative physical, emotional, and psychological effects.
Good Stress – This is often referred to as “eustress.” We experience this when we’re excited (like on a roller coaster or first date, while in competition, or before making a public presentation).

Tools to Turn Bad Stress to Good Stress

The good news is that, with the right tools, you can teach your students (and yourself) how to turn bad stress into good stress. Here are four methods to teach your Montessori students to help them manage their stress.

Reframing your experience – This means shifting your mind and changing your perspective or experience of what the stress you’re experiencing truly is.
Focus on things around you – What resources can you use to help you overcome your stress or reframe your mindset?
Identify your strengths – Focus on the positives; you may not have control of of the stressful situation, but ask yourself, what can you control? What strengths do you have to help you either overcome your stress or reframe your mindset?
Practice a growth mindset – This is another reframing technique; growth mindset means seeing challenges as opportunities to grow. How can this stressful event or situation improve your abilities or help you push yourself?

(We’ll get deeper into these types of stress management and reframing strategies in future blogs, so make sure you watch this space!)

One Quick Implementation Strategy: Quieting the Mind to Manage Stress

A very important thing to realize is that it’s very difficult to deal with stress in any situation if a child’s mind is racing. The only way to help them manage their stress is by first helping them to quiet their mind (and turn off negative or distracting chatter). Think of this like yoga or meditation, it’s something that takes practice! But this is how you help your students move from bad stress into good stress and develop a more productive, positive ways of thinking.

You can help children quiet their minds through a calming activity—such as creating and/or coloring mandalas. In Sanskrit, the word mandala actually means “circle,” or “completion.” Within its circular base, mandalas have the power to promote relaxation, balance, creativity, and healing.

We’re going to dive deeper into more ways to help students manage stress and their emotions, so make sure you sign up for our newsletter and join our Facebook group to receive more tips and be a part of a great, Montessori community!

By Spramani Elaun & Kristen Richter

montess — Tools to Help Montessori Students Manage Stress