Helping Children Cope with Tragedy

Guest blog post by Julia Cook

Our country has been plagued with several disasters in the last few years. There was the Joplin, Missouri tornado in May of 2011, we’ve had numerous catastrophic wildfires, Hurricane Sandy tore the east coast apart in October of 2012, and then there was that day…

I remember that horrible day…December 14th, 2012…The Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy.  My eyes filled with tears as I watched this horrific event unfold on television.  How could this happen?  How could we ever let anything like this happen?

Three days later, I found myself in front of 400 children doing an author visit at a different elementary school that was thousands of miles away.  When the kindergartners and first graders walked into the gym, sat down on the floor, and looked up at me, I lost it.  I couldn’t talk.  I couldn’t even breathe!  My heart felt like it had a hole in it…a big, empty hole.  Our world can be so cruel.  I made eye contact with one of the teachers.  Her eyes screamed “There’s a hole in my heart too!”

At that moment, I knew I had to find a way to reach out. Parents needed to know what to say to their kids and how to say it. Teachers needed to know what to do, what to say, and how to act.

When a disaster occurs, it affects everyone at different levels of intensity, much like the ripple effect when a rock is thrown into water. With natural disasters, most humans feel responsible for helping. We empathize and then focus our efforts on comforting and rebuilding. But we realize deep down that what happened could not have been prevented. Sandy Hook was different…disasters caused by man happen by choice.

The Ant Hill Disaster

In the months following, I wrote numerous articles and gave several media interviews surrounding the topic, “Helping Kids Cope with Disasters and Violence,” but the gnawing of hole in my heart continued.  I knew I needed to write a book, one that spoke to children about living through and living after a disaster. I decided to use ants as a metaphor.

Ants are masters at working together and rebuilding. Also, ant hills can be destroyed by humans as well as by storms, so the metaphor applies to both natural disasters and those caused by man. By writing this book, I could demonstrate empathetic understanding for children, as well as model positive parent and teaching strategies.

But this book would be very different from the others.  All of my other stories were proactive.  The Ant Hill Disaster is reactive…reactive to the hole inside my heart…inside all of our hearts.

After the Ant Hill School is destroyed, a little boy ant is afraid to go back to school.  His mom caringly explains to him that sometimes things happen in life that we have no control over, but we have to find a way to keep living and growing.

Helping Kids Cope with Disasters and Violence
The Ant Hill Disaster thoughtfully addresses fears associated with both natural and those caused by man. It models effective parenting and teaching responses. This book can help assure children that through love, empathetic understanding, preparation, and effective communication, they can stand strong, even in the midst of uncontrollable events.

When disasters, both natural and man-made occur, parents are faced with the challenge of discussing tragic events with their children. Although these might be difficult conversations, they are important and necessary. Always remember, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to talk to your child about traumatic events. At the end of the Ant Hill Disaster, I included tips for parents to help them talk about tragic events with their children. You can download a page of these tips on the right. Always remember: you are your child’s coping instructor!

I had the great honor of reading the Ant Hill Disaster over the phone to Michelle Gay who lost her 6-year old daughter in the Sandy Hook tragedy. She graciously agreed to write the forward of the book and I want to share her thoughts with you.

Foreword to The Ant Hill Disaster by Michele Gay

On the evening of December 14, 2012, my husband and I were faced with the unimaginable task of telling our older daughters of our family’s loss.  Our precious daughter and their little sister, Josephine, had perished in the tragedy at her school, Sandy Hook Elementary.  

Though a mother and former elementary school teacher,  I grasped for words that could explain the events of that morning... but there were no words. 

What I did manage to say was that I knew our Joey was in heaven and we would find a way to carry on together. That we loved them, and so did she, that we would never allow her sparkling personality and loving spirit to be lost in this tragedy.  

We came together with family, friends, neighbors, and our community to defy this tragedy with our love.  

In the weeks following, we sent our daughters back to school, confident in the love and support they would receive in our community. I volunteered to stay. I wanted to deliver a message: that we were meant to carry on together. And so we began our journey.

Julia Cook’s Ant Hill Disaster honors this journey out of loss and into hope. She lights the path for the youngest of readers with words, colors, and a familiar setting that young children understand and need. Her adorable characters model team work, empathy, and compassion in a child-friendly story that may translate to a tragic event in their own community or another, man-made or natural.   

Ant Hill Disaster is a message of hope and love that will touch and inspire young children and the adults who love them.

     Michele Gay
     Mother of Josephine Gay, A Sandy Hook Angel
     Co-Founder of Safe and Sound: A Sandy Hook Initiative

Words to Comfort Us from The Ant Hill Disaster

“We breathe in and breathe out, we hold onto each other.
We shed a lot of tears, and we love one another.
We’ve all come together as a strong team of ONE,
 We’ve rebuilt our lives, and we’re get things done!
They say that when change happens, it makes everyone grow.
Our pain is never forgotten, this we all know.
But together we somehow are learning to cope.
Because disasters will NEVER diminish our hope!”

To me, it is an absolute must to align the information contained in my books with the best research-based topic information available. This led me to contact the ALICE Training Institute. For more information on disaster preparedness visit the ALICE website: www.alicetraining.com.

Julia is nationally recognized as an award-winning children’s book author and parenting expert. She holds a Master's Degree in Elementary School Counseling, and while serving as a guidance counselor, she often used children’s books to enhance her classroom lessons. Julia has written dozens of books that teach students to become life-long problem solvers and enable them to deal with difficult situations in their lives. She enjoys visiting schools and talking with kids; in fact, she's done over 800 school visits! You can learn more at her website, www.juliacookonline.com.

Bring Some Passion Into Your Classroom!

Guest blog post by Jen Runde

Have you heard of Genius Hour? If you are looking for a way to bring a little more motivation, excitement, and real learning into your classroom, Genius Hour is the answer.

Genius Hour allows your students to explore their passions.  For one hour a week, they read, research, plan and design their passion projects. Students can take on any topic they are passionate about, and create a project they can share with the class, the school … the world!

Genius Hour is based on inquiry. Students need to develop a question related to their passion that they can research.  Simple questions that they can find the answer to easily should be discouraged.  Inquiry questions should lend themselves to the creation of a project – a passion project – at the end.  Projects can be media based (movie, slideshow, etc.), or something physical they build, design, or create.  At the completion of your Genius Hour timeline, these projects need to be shared with an audience. Throughout the entire process, students will be engaged in research, reading nonfiction articles, planning through graphic organizers, writing, and reflecting – all integral areas of our Language Arts curriculum.

I introduced Genius Hour in my classroom two weeks ago, and my students haven’t stopped talking about it. I dedicated a bulletin board space to it (well, actually a blackboard space because I’m out of bulletin board space).  This is where we will post our handouts and weekly inspirations.

For our first Genius Hour, I asked my students to close their eyes and think about something they were really passionate about.  I then handed out sticky notes and had them write down their passions and post them on our board.  I then showed them the video from Kid President, “A Pep Talk from Kid President.”

I also showed them the video found on the Genius Hour site. That video is aimed at teachers so I wouldn’t show it in a class with younger students, but it was perfect for my grade 5/6 students and it gave them a great overview of the project.

I then handed out a second sticky note (in a different colour) to each student and asked them to think about how they could turn their passion into a project – something they had a question about and could build a passion project on. They then posted this second sticky note on the board.

I gave each student a folder and small notebook to keep during the duration of our project. The notebook is for all our notes – graphic organizers, written research, written plans, and a weekly reflection. The folder is to keep any sheets or printed work they have. Their excitement about this project was evident when they immediately began to decorate their folder covers.

For our second Genius Hour, the students were to come with 2 possible inquiry questions for their passion projects that they have discussed with their parents. During this second genius hour, I met with each student to approve one of their ideas. I did have to work with a few students to tweak their questions to make them a little deeper, but most were ready and it was a smooth process. By the end of the class, each student had a question, a direction to head in, and a solid idea for their passion project. In our next genius hour, all students will be able to start on their research.

Some of the inquiry questions my grade 5/6 students have come up with are:

• How were medieval castle walls constructed?  (passion project idea:  constructing a model of a castle wall)
• Can I create new dessert recipes?  (passion project idea:  making a cookbook)
• How do you make doll clothes?  (passion project idea:  a sketchbook of doll clothes and two handmade outfits)
• What was the inspiration behind the movie, Star Wars?  (passion project idea:  a media movie or slideshow showcasing pictures and information)
• Can I design my ideal bedroom?  (passion project idea:  an interior design board complete with swatches and furniture ideas, where to find or make items, and pricing options)

I am allowing my students to work at home on their projects (if they wish) as I am not assessing the final physical projects, but rather their process and presentation. If they are working at home, they do need to have all needed materials at school each week for Genius Hour.

Genius Hour has become MY passion project.  And if I continue to show and model that passion to my students, it will continue to motivate them. If this is something you are interested in doing in your classroom, you can make it work.  Timelines are flexible (we are taking 12 weeks (12 in-class hours) for our first projects. If we do a second project this year (which I am planning on), we will have a slightly shorter timeline. Class structure is also flexible. We are doing this whole group every Friday in our language block for our 12 weeks, but it can be built into your literacy centres, or completed during your computer lab time (if this is something you have).

You can get a copy of all the handouts I have given to my students HERE and HERE

I will also be posting a weekly update on my blog:  Runde’s Room (link:  www.rundesroom.com).

• Passion Projects in the Classroom – Week One 
• Passion Projects – Week Two

You can click on any of the links in this post to get started on your own Genius Hour path.  It is hands-down the BEST addition to our classroom this year.  I hope I have inspired you to ignite that passion in your students.
Jen

Jennifer Runde is a teacher with twelve years of experience in the upper elementary grades.  She currently has a grade 5/6 class in Ontario, Canada.  She enjoys creating fun and interactive lessons that keep her students engaged in the learning process.  Follow her blog, Runde’s Room, to see what she has going on in her classroom, and find some fun ideas for math, literacy, and technology that you can implement in your own class.

Teaching Kids to Express Appreciation

Two Holiday Freebies for You!

How often do we take time to tell others that we appreciate them? We might let our family members know we care, but do we provide time for students to express appreciation in the classroom?

Team greeting cards are a simple way to encourage students to show appreciation for each other, and it only takes about 15 minutes to implement this strategy. Students in teams of three or four will pass cards around in "roundtable" fashion and will write words of gratitude and appreciation on them before returning them to their owners. This activity worked so beautifully with my students that I created these two freebies to share with you. You can use the Team Thanks gratitude before the Thanksgiving Holidays and Gifts of Appreciation before the Winter Holidays. Click the freebie covers below to download them.

Prewriting Activity: What Do We Appreciate?
Before you begin the activity, lead a class discussion about gratitude and the importance of showing appreciation. Ask students to help you brainstorm different things they appreciate about each other. They might like someone's sense of humor, their willingness to help, or their creative ideas when working together. Create a long list and leave it on the board during the next part of the activity.

Team Thanks	Gifts of Appreciation

Team Card Write-Around Activity
When you explain the activity to your students, tell them that they will be passing cards around the team and writing words of appreciation on the cards. Let them know upfront that you expect everyone to write kind comments and that you will be reading what they write. While they are writing , monitor the activity to be sure that no one writes something that might hurt another child's feelings. You know who to watch! While students are writing, you may want to play soft instrumental or holiday music to set the tone. Here are the step-by-step directions:

1. Choose the appropriate type of card depending on the season of the year. Give each student one card. Both packets have several variations, but you can give all of them the same card if you like.
2. Ask each student to write his or her name on the front of the card. 
3. Set a timer for about 2 minutes. Ask all students to pass their cards to the left and open the card they receive. They should notice whose name is on the front and think about what they appreciate about that teammate. Have them write a few sentences of appreciation on the front inside flat and sign their name to their comments.
   Note: If they are having trouble thinking of something to say, suggest that they start with the words, "Thank you for ..." which makes it a little easier for some students. 
4. When the timer goes off, ask students to fold the card back before passing it to the next person on the left. This keeps the next person from seeing what they wrote. 
5. Ask everyone to check the name on the front before they begin writing. Set the timer again and allow about 2 minutes to write words of appreciation. 
6. Repeat this one more time and then have students pass the cards they are holding back to the person whose name is on the front.

Expressing Appreciation Year Round
My students really enjoyed this activity, and they treasured their cards. I often did this activity right before I switched the students to new teams, and sometimes they didn't want to change teams after they read the comments from their teammates! If you want to do this activity later in the year, you can find a generic card called "Our Team Rocks" on my Teambuilding page on Teaching Resources. I hope your students enjoy it as much as mine did!

Cooking Up a Caring Classroom

Raising academic standards is certainly a worthy goal, but sometimes it can have unintended consequences. To find time to teach the rigorous reading and math Common Core standards, many schools are cutting back on physical education, the arts, and life-skill lessons. Yet we need to remember that we aren’t teaching programmable robots – we are teaching children. Our students arrive in our classrooms with unique social, physical, and emotional needs that can’t be ignored. The key to teaching the whole child is fostering a caring classroom environment while upholding high academic standards.

Implementing Class Meetings 
How do we find time in an already packed day to teach social skills and foster caring classrooms? For me, regular class meetings were the answer. They provided the perfect opportunity to work through the social and emotional issues that popped up throughout the year. I started having just two meetings per week, one on Monday and one on Friday, but they were so effective that I soon implemented daily morning meetings. For about 20 minutes each morning we gathered on our carpet to set purposes for learning and work through any classroom issues. Often I read aloud a children’s book that provided a springboard for discussion of deeper issues. It was during those times that we became a family of classmates who listened to each other and cared enough to work things out.

Julia Cook – Inspiring Kids to Become Life-long Problem Solvers
Fast forward to October of this year when I had the pleasure of meeting Julia Cook, a former guidance counselor and the author of dozens of books that deal with social and emotional issues. How I wish I had known about Julia Cook when I was still teaching!

Julia and I connected at the Elementary School Conference, and it didn’t take long to discover her passion for writing books that enable kids to become life-long problem solvers. You might be familiar with some of her more popular books like My Mouth is a Volcano and  A Bad Case of Tattle Tongue, but you might not be aware that she has written over 40 such books and many of them have teacher guides to go with them. I only had to read a few of her books to fall in love with them! Julia truly has a gift for digging into the heart of each issue in ways that appeal to kids of all ages. As I began to explore her complete collection, all I could think about was how perfect they would be for class meetings! I could imagine reading one book per week depending on the needs of my students, and using the book as a point of discussion throughout the week.

Ideal Books for Class Meetings

Julia’s books are ideal for fostering class discussion because each one is short, engaging, and focuses on just one topic. Whether the characters are children or animals, they are appealing and they face issues to which most kids can relate. Not only do they teach kids how to deal with problems, the books include proactive strategies and actions kids can take to avoid having those problems in the future. For example, It’s Hard to Be a Verb gives overactive kids strategies to help them focus. The term “ADHD” is not mentioned in the book, but anyone teaching children with ADHD would find this to be a helpful resource.  Another of my favorites, Teamwork Isn’t My Thing and I Don’t Like to Share, includes specific strategies to help kids work more effectively in teams. As a further bonus, many of Julia’s books have a companion teacher guide that you can purchase with activities and ideas to extend learning.

Julia Cook Book Titles and Topics Checklist

After I realized that Julia’s books would be ideal for class meetings, I asked her if she had a chart with all of her book titles and the corresponding issues addressed by each book. She didn’t, but she agreed that it was a terrific idea. One of her publishers, the National Center for Youth Issues, offered to create this chart as a helpful guide for teachers. You can click on the image on the right to download the Julia Cook Titles and Topics Checklist for use in your classroom. Use this chart to help you locate the books you need for specific topics. You’ll even find the ISBN number for each book to help you locate it! After you read each book to your class, check it off  in the right hand column to keep track of which ones you’ve read to your class.

Create Your Own Class Meeting Collection
Your library may not have all of the books you need to use them in class meetings throughout the year. When Julia learned about my blog post, she wanted to offer a special deal to my followers so they could create their own customized class meeting collections. If you order at least 20 books from her website (any combination of children’s books or teachers guides), she will give you free shipping and 10% off your total order! Since shipping alone is normally $2 per book, this is a huge discount. To take advantage of this offer, order at least 20 books from Julia Cook Online. When you check out, enter the words “Cooking Up a Caring Classroom” in the field where it asks how you would like the books to be autographed. Julia personally processes all orders, and when she sees this code, she will give you the 10% discount and free shipping. You can also email her in advance to tell her that you’ll be placing a Class Meeting Collection order.

Recipe for Success
Some might argue that implementing the Common Core means there's no time to teach social skills or help kids become life-long problem solvers. However, I would argue that it's more important than ever that we find the time to teach life skills. The new standards require students to become actively engaged in their learning, often working with others to accomplish a task. If we don’t take time to teach kids to work together effectively, those lessons will be wasted and academic progress will suffer. We must teach the whole child and not focus on academics alone.

Thankfully, each of Julia’s books offers a recipe for success to enable kids to deal with important issues.  To learn more about some of Julia's books, please check out the blog hop below. Clicking each title will take you to a post with a description of the book and some teaching tips.

How can you find the time to teach social skills? Look over your daily schedule and talk with your administrator about how you might be able to work a few class meetings a week into your plans. If you absolutely can’t find the time, how about reading one book each week as a part of your literacy instruction? Reading just one book per week will help you cook up a caring classroom of students who are destined for success!

Investigating Gummy Bears

Guest blog post by Amy Alvis

I was looking on Pinterest for a lab to use with my students to teach them the scientific method. The students will have science fair project to do at the end of the year and I wanted to take them step by step through the process so that they will know exactly what to do for their projects. 

I found a gummy bear science lab by Sue at Science for Kids: Adventures of an Elementary School Science Teacher. It is an awesome lab, but I wanted my students to have a more complex scientific method model to work with. Click the image below to download the lab worksheets I created for this activity.

I gave my students the question we were going to test: What solution will make the gummy bear increase its mass and length the most? Next, they came up with their hypothesis. Since we had not gotten to our physical science unit yet, I explained was a solution was. We then brainstormed ideas about what solutions they wanted to test. They decided to test sugar water, salt water, vinegar and water, lemon juice and water, food coloring and water, rubbing alcohol and water, and soda and water. 

We then discussed what materials we would need to conduct the lab (we added things as we did the lab and saw that additional things were needed). Next we discussed the control (plain water) and the variables. They listed the dependent variable (mass and length of gummy bear), the independent variable (the solute - what was added to the cup of water) and the constants (amount of water, amount of solute, and time the gummy bear will be in the solution)

We filled in the procedure as we did the lab. The students worked in group of 3 or 4. The first thing we did was find the mass and length of the gummy bears.

The students measured out 50 ml of water to put in each cup.

They then added the liquid/solid to create their solutions. We put in 1 T of each of the liquids and we added sugar and salt to the water until it was saturated. Make sure that the salt solution has reached its saturation point. The groups that didn't add enough salt didn't see the same results as the groups that did.

The students then added the gummy bears to the solutions and we let them sit overnight.

The next day, the students found the mass and length of the gummy bears after their overnight soak in the solutions.

They then recorded the information on their lab sheets.

 This was the first time I had done this lab and it surprised me that the gummy bears grew so much.

Once the data was collected on the lab sheets, we transferred the data to a chart that the students added to their science journals. Most groups found that the vinegar, lemons, and food coloring made the gummy bears gain the most mass.

They finished the lab by writing down their conclusions on the lab sheet. If you didn't download the lab sheets for this lesson, you can click this link to download them now. Thank you to Laura Candler for allowing me to do a guest post on her blog! 

Amy Alvis lives in Indianapolis, Indiana and teaches 5th and 6th grade math, science, and social studies. She is the creator of the blog Math, Science, and Social Studies .. Oh, My! You can find more free activities for these subject areas by visiting her blog.