Participants left Linda’s training excited about “new books and different ways to use books to bring diversity into the classroom.” One planned to “talk to my center director about new books.” Another said she’d “offer a lot of diversity throughout the classroom and be aware of the tough questions that might come.” A center manager intended to “organize resources for teachers to be able to access them.” 100% of the participants said they’d recommend the training to a colleague! Perhaps that why our next Many Eyes, Many Voices training, which is more than a month away, is already filled to capacity…

After reading If Peace Is… (a book which has, sadly, gone out of print), another participant shared an anecdote about a boy who said peace was a shark. Why? Well, his teacher knew that this boy loves the ocean and its creatures. He had recently visited the New England Aquarium, and his parents said he stood for very long time just gazing at the big fish tank at sharks and other fish swimming around and around.

The Ellsworth group was also very positive about Who’s In Rabbit’s House? —a book that is rarely so well received. Linda reported that many participants were familiar with this story and already considered it one of their favorites, which provides evidence for our hunch that with this book, “practice makes perfect.”

At the training in Presque Isle, co-facilitated by Karen Campbell-Sawyer and Susan Giggey-Bergeron, participants had compelling interpretations of peace. One noted that as a concept, peace is largely culturally defined. Another said, “children need to feel valued and safe in order to be peaceful.” Discussion also yielded the observation that “sometimes it’s better for adults to stay out of [conflict], listen to the children and assess how they are doing before jumping in to solve it for them.”

Karen and Susan observed that the most challenging thing about this training for them is “getting people to think beyond the book in front of them, to how to use other books and materials to deepen the exploration of a given theme.” The example they gave is that participants who don’t have experience with the tradition of folklore cannot appreciate Who’s In Rabbit’s House as an example of the genre, but instead, take it out of context and decide they don’t like it as a story.

Still, participants appreciated the activity suggestions in the Activity & Resource Guide, and by the second session, some had already started implementing them.

We are so pleased to be able to spread the messages of our Born to Read trainings at these conferences around the state. Many thanks to the RDC staff and conference coordinators who have thought of us, and to all the presenters who’ve ably represented us.

The first conference was sponsored by Child Care Options RDC at Kennebec Valley Community College. Janet Lyons facilitated a 3-hour session on Peaceable Stories in which she gave copies of It’s Mine and When Sophie Gets Angry—Very, Very Angry… to each participant. She read Dudley Randall’s poem “The Ballad of Birmingham” as a way of starting a conversation about how peace and safety aren’t always where we expect them to be. (You can find the full text of this poem here.) Then she divided participants into three groups and assigned one of the “Reflective Questions for Educators” from the Activity & Resource Guide to each group.

The discussion of It’s Mine focused on vocabulary (quibble, bicker, defiantly, and peaceful) and emotional literacy. Janet also modeled a picture walk using Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends to look at friendship from another angle. Participants made frog and toad puppets (with instructions from this website), and talked about how the activity could be adapted for different age groups. The discussion of Sophie revolved around how people get from anger to calm, with several participants recognizing that some of the children in their care need to actively burn off frustration before they can talk about what the problem is and how to solve it. There was also some discussion of Peace Corners (or Tables), and how adults respond to children who need space or activity in order to deal with their emotions.

More recently, Myrna Koonce led a session at Carelink RDC’s conference at the University of New England in Biddeford. Myrna and Janet had planned together, but their sessions wound up being quite different, because Myrna had twice as many participants and only half as much time! She introduced both It’s Mine and Sophie, and guided the group to look closely at the illustrations in the latter to see how Molly Bang’s use of color mirrors what is happening in the text. With both books, participants seemed to enjoy being broken down into small groups for discussion, even though the room set-up (a lecture hall) made it challenging. However, the room was transformed into a theatre when a few participants agreed to act out It’s Mine, and had everyone laughing at their dramatic characterizations.

Myrna reported a great participant-to-participant “aha” moment. Someone described a large cardboard box that’s designated as a quiet place or “peace place,” but wasn’t getting used by the children. Someone asked if she ever used it. “Oh,” she said, “I never go in there!” “Maybe if you use it,” her colleague suggested, “the children will follow.”

Reports on our third and final conference session, and the Peaceable Stories that took place last month, are coming soon!

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.