Born to Read Trainers

Dr. Susan Linn, author of The Case for Make Believe, Consuming Kids, and The Hostile Take-over of Childhood, is a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Harvard Medical School, and the co-founder/director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. She is an award-winning ventriloquist, internationally recognized for her pioneering use of puppets as a tool in play therapy with children. Her work has been seen on “Mister Roger’s Neighborhood,” the “Today Show,” and “Good Morning America.”

The Friends School of Portland (located on Mackworth Island in Falmouth) is bringing Dr. Linn to Maine next month. She’ll be giving a public lecture at the school on “The Case for Make Believe,” Tuesday, May 12 at 7pm. Earlier that day, she’ll lead a workshop for early childhood educators called “Puppets in the Classroom.” The workshop focuses on using puppets to help children express themselves in the face of the increasingly commercialization of children’s play.

For more information on either the lecture or the workshop, contact the Friends School at 781-6321. Thanks to Kimberly Simmons for letting us know about what promises to be a wonderful day with Dr. Linn.

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.

During the day-long retreat for Born to Read trainers on March 4, we began a discussion of Gary Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy with a brainstorm/word association exercise around the notion of community. I used the amazing tools at wordle.net to turn our resulting word list into a ‘cloud,’ with the most prominent words showing up in the largest print:

Are there words you would add? Please leave them in the comments section!

Last month, Sharon Abair led this group of 16 from a wide range of towns (Waterville, Winslow, Mercer, Oakland, Palmyra, Newport, and Belgrade) in reflections on peaceable practice. They were inspired by the assignment to try sharing the books from the bag with the children in their care. They had great activity ideas, such as making books to go with My Friend and I and posting a wall of handprint tracings in the classroom. One class included parents’ hands on the wall, and the children found the presence of those hands very comforting.

One participant who unsure about Who’s In Rabbit’s House? called Sharon after the training to let her know that she ended up sharing it successfully. She also related a fantastic anecdote: during a lunchtime that was particularly boisterous, one little boy said, “Kids, kids! Let’s have a little peace around here so I can think about nice things!”

This group left with great enthusiasm for trying book walks, and felt rewarded by the opportunity to interact with colleagues. “I really enjoyed getting out and doing the group thing with other people,” one evaluation form reads. “I love to learn from others and glean from their ideas.” Thanks to Sharon for making this exchange of ideas possible.

For this training, Bahia Yackzan and Linda Levesque worked with a very sophisticated group of nine experienced early childhood educators and two Born to Read volunteers. Bahia noted that “it was a wonderful thing to recognize, and adjust our agenda to, the fact that this group of providers was really ready for a deeper level of discussion.” Linda explained that they skipped some of the small group book review activities on the agenda because “discussion was rich and lively as a full group.” In fact, apparently the participants were so engaged that they lost track of time in both sessions and kept talking until after 9:00!

It’s always nice when a participant brings a personal experience to Many Eyes, Many Voices (unless, of course, it takes up too much time!). One teacher in this group brought in several books from the late sixties and early seventies, to show how full of stereoptypes they were. She had adopted a child from Central America in early seventies, and recalled how hard it was to find children’s books that showed skin colors other than white. She also told an anecdote about a local store getting a mistaken shipment of dark-skinned baby dolls, which she was thrilled to be able to give to her daughter.

These participants were also very successful in field-testing the books between sessions. Most reported that children responded well to We Can Do It! While the children didn’t pay that much attention to the differences visible in the photographs, the teachers were able to find opportunities to start conversations that revealed true attitudes about those differences.

There was one comment on a participant evaluation that piqued my interest, and neither trainer mentioned it in her report. Under “What new ideas did this training bring to you?” one person had written “Hot glue gun Braille letters – brilliant!” Can anyone expand a bit on this idea?