Kindness, Humor and Acceptance: Being OK with the way it is

Creativity, humor, laughter and acceptance help children experience education through warm-hearted rapport, a sense of belonging and meaningful contribution to their community. Children learn well when they feel at ease and feel like they are part of a community of learners.  

When children relax and become more at ease, they can be less anxious, fostering extended focus, understanding content, experiencing creativity and joy with themselves and with each other. 

Humor, laughter, smiling and joy bring people together. Students in my classes are invited into a culture where knowledge can flow and hearts can open. I create a formal learning environment that also includes a theatrical atmosphere to help children feel more connected, making relating easier online and on-site. 

The academic content is always available, but delivering content is part theater, part grounded application and partly student driven. 

Children thrive when they “get got.”

When children feel heard, respected and feel important enough to be understood on their terms, they express more of who they truly are, and surprise us by what they are capable of achieving.

As adults, we know exactly who the people are in our lives who “get” us and embrace more of our authenticity.

What if children had that experience at school, in their learning environment? What if the educational experience of learning included authenticity and acceptance of who each child is? A culture of kindness and respect begins with agreement with rules and guidelines, and shines when there is harmony and shared goals that propel innovation.

For me, teaching and innovation go hand in hand. Creativity is a way of life. Children learn well when they feel at ease and feel like their contributions are received and appreciated in their community of learners. I help children experience education through warm-hearted rapport, a sense of belonging and meaningful contribution to their community.

Interdisciplinary

I enjoy teaching all subjects and help students to embrace the sciences and the arts. I enjoy showing students ways to integrate their scientific learning with math, hands-on art projects, imagination and wonder.

Communication is important too. I teach and challenge students to learn language arts skills, apply descriptive language, writing skills, and presentation skills to help their audience understand what they are excited about.

I create units of study and inquiry by giving students big concepts to entertain. My classes include learning about the brain, the cosmos, where did dinosaurs come from, ancient teachers, art and culture of indigenous people, what is inside the earth, metamorphosis, life cycles, physics and the transfer of energy, fine art, and much more.

I help students take big ideas that engage their imaginations and their intellect and scaffold projects into “bite-sized” pieces. Then I guide the children to express those elements of learning through art, writing, models, song, movement, animations, skits and plays. As new content is delivered, the children’s expressions follow. The expressions begin small, so their motor skills can track the conceptualization. The projects scale up in size as the children become familiar with the forms and see information represented in academic and creatively expressed ways. Then large format expression can emerge in which the narrative of the concept becomes expressed on a larger scale that requires more action from the body, more space, more expression, more emotion. By the time children get to this point of the unit of study and inquiry, they know it, and can present what they learned. 

Being Present, Mindfulness

and Social/Emotional Learning

I support children in mindfulness practices and simple breathing exercises that help them become more aware. As children become more connected with their feelings of peace and calm, feelings of gratitude, feelings of ease and feelings of certainty, they develop a softer, more natural, easy way of being present. This helps with self-regulation, builds trust with others, allows for honesty and authenticity and much more. Breathing and acknowledging feelings helps children understand and process more of their day-to-day emotional experiences so that when difficult feelings do arise, children can learn to observe their experience, and understand social situations with greater perspective and even with compassion and forgiveness.

I support children to understand that feelings are normal and are always changing and can be observed, accepted and appreciated. Talking about feelings is important for children. I help children to talk about feelings and celebrate feelings throughout the course of the day or the lesson. So often in life, children talk about their feelings when there is something “wrong” or after emotions have escalated. I encourage children to acknowledge the feelings that they experience, as a natural part of the day. We take a moment to feel the feelings of success after doing a page of math problems, or feel the feelings of generosity after helping another. I encourage children to feel what that feeling is, and take a deep breath with that feeling, in that moment. 

Getting comfortable with feelings is beneficial as the journey of learning takes students out of the familiar, out of the “easy,” out of their comfort zones into the realm where mistakes are made, when sensitivities emerge and doubts or feelings of frustration become present. Mindfulness and self-regulation don’t keep unpleasant feelings away but they do offer students the opportunity to create an inner foundation for what they experience and observe. They may even learn to laugh along the way, to becoming more patient, persistent and resilient people.