Born to Read Trainers

Here’s a report from Denise on a training in Belfast on March 9 and 16. There were 20 people in the first session, and 16 in the next, representing 7 different programs. She notes that the group had both very talkative and very quiet members. She spoke to this at the end of the first evening, saying that she hoped those who were silent would try speaking and participating more in the next week, and that those who had a lot to say would try to pause before speaking to see if others wanted to speak.

Denise continues:

This group reflection on the word “peace” produced the usual word associations, until I asked about possible gender differences in perception of peace, their children’s perceptions, and how media/culture can shape perceptions, i.e. strength, aggression, being the warrior vs. being the negotiator, or practicing peace. We also discussed whether conflict in our lives offers growth and excitement or stress and trauma.  I always find it hard to get participants to the deeper part of this reflection, and found the discussion of culture/media effective in getting there. I brought in a bumper sticker quote: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will know peace.” This was useful in generating discussion about children’s experience/need for feelings of power vs. feelings of peace.

Since there’s never enough time to discuss all books, I chose one from each section. It’s Mine provided for the richest discussion.

I asked participants “What are you doing in your classroom now in use of books (1)  to promote peace and (2) to address behavior issues?” One described using coffee can stories, and described how “as soon as I say ‘good night moon,’ the whole feeling of the book comes back.” I also asked what behavior issues they had. The response was minimal (perhaps participants don’t feel safe enough with the group to answer this early in the training). One said “we have fighting and hitting, and we have divorce.” Everyone agreed with the latter, and so we talked about impact of divorce on home life, and the role of the early childhood educator in that.

At the beginning of the second session, in response to the question “did you do/see anything differently this week?” one participant described how she now saw incidents among the children as “conflict” rather than “oh, that’s just Johnny acting up.” Almost all participants had read almost all books with their children. A K-5 guidance counselor described great success in sharing If Peace Is… with a group of kindergarten children.  A trio of staff from a home-based program described how much their kids (ages 2-5) loved Who’s in Rabbit’s House: creating props, using paper towel tubes to help enunciate the voices, etc.

We had Jennifer Howard, a Montessori educator who recently became a children’s book writer/illustrator, as a guest presenter. She joined in a discussion of emotional literacy (none of the participants had ever heard this term before), describing the “emotion cards” she has created. Each card is a photo of the face of a child in her care showing an emotion. On the back is a stick figure with the same facial expression, to emphasize what it looks like in a drawing; the emotion is also labeled. The emotion cards are paired with several stories to help extend and integrate them into classroom hands-on experiential play.

Then Jennifer shared her “story basket” idea. With I Love you Sun, I Love you Moon, her basket has a flannel on a placemat and objects related to the book that she hands around during storytime. The heart object is particularly special to the children. For a Frederick story basket, Jennifer hand drew characters, cut them out and had a child color them. They now use these cut-outs to retell the story. For Hey, Little Ant, the basket has a shoe and a plastic ant, which she puts out with “I Wonder” questions. (She doesn’t let 3- to 6-year-olds use this basket without supervision, as she feels they would use the shoe inappropriately.)

At the end of the training, participants were given 5-10 minutes to talk with each other about their plans for implementing training. Most reported that they would try out story baskets—this idea had strong appeal. For more info on Jennifer’s story baskets or her new children’s book, go to her blog.

Denise shared a few ideas she had for future trainings:

At the Trainer Reflection Retreat, we discussed the idea of having participants create “slogans” taken directly or inspired by Peaceable Stories books/training, which they could envision using throughout their day with children (e.g. “peace is a promise,” “we call our hands gentle,” “you know, we’re just not going to agree,” “you can’t say you can’t play,” “we have a problem over here”). This would be good break-out group activity.

In break-out groups, Denise wished she had asked participants to consider, “In what situations (1-on-1, small groups, circle time) would you use which books to address  direct behavior, issues & needs, circumstances?”

She also recalled the quote “social environment becomes embedded in our biology,” from a pediatrician who spoke at Infant Toddler Awareness Day at the State House, and thought this would be useful in discussion about impact of peaceable environments.