The Delicate Balancing Act - Parent and Teacher, part two

As a parent we are faced with many challenges as our children grow. The first days they come home we have to figure out their many cues and what different cries mean. We have to figure out how change a diaper without getting peed on (especially if you have a boy or two) and how to burp a child without getting spit-up on. We have to figure out how we balance being a parent, a spouse, housework and for most of us, working a job too! We spend time wondering if we are doing it right, wrong or like most of us, somewhere in-between. Then that magical day comes and we send our first child off to kindergarten and a whole new balancing act begins.

My husband and I had this joyous experience a few months ago when our oldest who will forever be "our baby" boarded the bus that would take her off to kindergarten. I had written in a previous post about my trepidation about doing so and for the most part, that trepidation was unfounded. Her teacher is awesome, she has made friends and genuinely loves going to school.

So while my original reasons for worry were most unfounded, I have found things to worry about that never occurred to me! First, my daughter is smart. Not Sheldon Cooper smart, but smart enough to be reading at an almost second grade level in Kindergarten. This has resulted in her doing first grade ELA in Kindergarten at a time when most of her classmates are still on sight words. This led to issues the first few weeks because she couldn't understand why she was in a reading group with only one other girl while everyone else had reading groups of 5 - 7 students. She felt singled out and got sad. After we explained that she was being challenged and was doing well, she calmed down and felt better about it.

Until they started doing math that is...now being the daughter of a math teacher and an engineer with teachers and engineers as grandparents she is inundated with math in one form or another on a pretty consistent basis. She and her brother will "help" me check papers, "assist" me creating activities, "build" with daddy and so on. As a result, she is also advanced in math. This lead to a great deal of frustration on her part because everything was so easy for her. And her frustration lead to her acting out in class in the form of "helping" her friends do their work which really translates into giving them the answers. Cue another discussion about the difference between helping someone and doing it for them.

On the flipside, while my daughter is advanced on an academic scale she is exactly where she needs to be on a maturity scale. She has difficulty keeping her hands to herself, gets cases of the giggles, forgets to use her inside voice and is the most adorable, wonderful little girl that I love more than any other. She is strong-willed and while that will serve her well someday, it does earn her strikes in school for wanting to do things her own way. She is a unique little girl with a well developed imagination who will be a handful as a teenager. I still haven't figured out how to teach her to temper her impulse to act on the things that cross her mind. I know as a teacher that this can lead to big(ger) problems the older she gets. But, she is five and that ability comes with time. So in the meantime, I'll keep doing the delicate balancing act and hope that it serves all of us well! How do you handle the balancing act?

Parent, Teacher...Protector?

Boo-boos that need a Band-Aid?  Check, I've got that covered.  Hurts that need a "mommy hug or kiss" to make it all better?  Check, I've got that covered too!  How to handle the following conversation, not so much...  One day not long before the school year let out I went to pick my daughter up from preschool only to find her sitting alone, trying not to cry, while the other little girls were all playing.  I asked her what was wrong and she said "mommy, they said they don't want to play with me and I need to go away".  She is a five year old, beautiful, sweet, little girl and at that moment my heart broke.  Thinking back on it now brings tears to my eyes.  I can protect her from the physical, make boo-boos go away with the magic of a Band-Aid and a kiss.  But, I cannot make other little girls be nice.  I can't protect her from the emotional hurts that potentially await her when she starts Kindergarten this fall.  That terrifies me. 

As a teacher at the secondary level I can and do intervene when I see bullying.  We have a support system in place and a zero tolerance policy.  I have spent years working to make sure that it doesn't happen in my classroom and as a school we work so hard to make sure that if it happens in the our building that there are outlets, support systems and interventions to stop it.  But as a parent, I don't have that same access.  She will be out of my sight, my reach, my "protection" all day, five days a week.  While I know that she is going to an excellent school, with a great reputation for stopping bullying in it's tracks, I also know that as parent I have to prepare her.  I have to give her tools to combat what she is already encountering.

So, I did what all people do and I started researching how I could give her the tools to not only face what she *may* encounter, but also how to overcome it and not let it hurt her like that moment in preschool did.  I found an absolutely awesome series of blogs by a website named "A Mighty Girl" (http://www.amightygirl.com). 

 

The first post is entitled ""The End of Bullying Begins With Me": Bullying Prevention Books for Young Mighty Girls" and has excellent books and resources for young girls (and I'm sure they would work for young boys too!) that begin the conversation about feelings, bullying and the result.  The post is broken down into "Another Person’s Shoes: Teaching Empathy" which features books about how other people are feeling, that they may feel the same way and that it's okay to be different.  It goes on to a section entitled "Beginning With Me: Dealing With Bullies" which showcases books about how face bullying, how to stop bullying and how to not let it stop you.  The post ends with "Additional Recommended Resources" which features links to other parts of the site and other types of books.  I spent a great deal of time with going through these sources and picked a few of them up to spend some time reading during our story time daily! 

From a teacher's standpoint I was quite interested in the second part of the series "Taking a Stand Against Bullying: Bullying Prevention Books for Tweens and Teens" (and the third  which I will address in just a minute!)  This entries in this part of the series features books that I think would be excellent to pick up and keep in my classroom for when I have students come to me with bullying problems or for when I notice them myself.  It features two types of books; ones about fictional bullies and also non-fiction books about how to deal with bullies.  In the first section "Mean Girls: Fictional Bullies" I found books that I think would greatly appeal to some of my students who need to read about others situations without it being "too real".  In the second section "Taking A Stand: Non-Fiction About Bullying" I found some wonderful workbooks and implementation types of resources that I am going to recommend to our counseling department!  I think that they would find them very useful for those students who come to them and need constructive ways to address the problems.

I spent a great deal of time on the last post from both a parent and teacher standpoint.  The last post in the series is "Leading the Way: Bullying Prevention Books for Parents and Educators"  and it is broken down into three phenomenal areas.  The first, "It Starts Young: Bullying in Preschool and Elementary School" has great resources for both parents and teachers of our youngest children.  (One I already ordered is " Little Girls Can Be Mean: Four Steps to Bully-Proof Girls in the Early Grades").  The second area, "Social Drama: Bullying Among Tweens and Teens" helps parents and educators to carry the message on to the next level.  It features books to keep the conversation going when young girls really start to stop talking to the adults around them and are more influenced by their peers.  The last area, "New Dimensions of Bullying: Cyberbullying and Bullying Adults" has some amazing resources to address how bullying is being taken to the next level and how to shut it down.   

While I know that books alone will not solve the problem, at least they will help me to feel less helpless.  If I can arm my daughter and my son with the tools necessary to be strong against what they face, maybe next time my daughter won't feel so alone.  Maybe next time she'll have the words to speak back or the strength to go to her teacher.  By the way, I had a conversation with her preschool teacher after this incident.  Her teacher said that she is working hard to address these issues.  I forwarded the above blogs to her and she is going to order some of the books for her classroom library.  Every step helps.

The Delicate Balancing Act - Parent and Teacher

I have been a teacher for just over 15 years now and in all of that time I have only ever been on the teacher side of the desk.  This fall, however, I will start a new journey with my oldest child as she enters kindergarten.  I will have to learn how to walk that delicate line between being the teacher of 120 students a day and the parent of one very small student!   

How do you walk that line?  How do you go from being the one who is entrusted with the education, the safety and well being of someone's child(ren) to being the one who entrusts your child to someone else?  School hasn't even started yet and I am already worried.  I worry that the teacher won't understand my daughter's unique personality, that the teacher won't foster her love of learning, that the other students will be mean to her.  I worry that my little girl, who has been reading since she was four, who loves using her imagination to entertain herself and her little brother and who LOVES to learn will be crushed by the new CCSS and hate school.

I went to the new parent orientation and found out that she is expected to be able to write a paragraph by the end of October and that recess is now combined with the 30 minutes they get for lunch.  So in the course of a 7.5 hour day of school she gets less than 30 minutes to play.  I know, trust me I know, that school is not playtime but at 5?  At 5 they still learn best through play and investigation, now sitting at a table...

But, I also know that if I expect others to trust me with their children, that I too, must trust that others will teach my children and protect them and give them what they need when they are out of my hands.  It will definitely be a fine balancing act but hopefully one that I will be able to use to enrich my own abilities as a teacher. 

In the meantime, I have started going through different stores on TeachersPayTeachers to find resources that we can use to "play school" this summer.  Three of my favorite stores so far are:
1)  Christina Winter
2) 1st Grade Salt Life
3)  KB3Teach