Friday, April 17, 2015
Kindergarten Troubles
I am having a lot of trouble with my students not keeping their hands to themselves. I have officially told them that they are not to touch each other period. Not in nice ways or mean ways. They like to step on the back of each other's shoes, give flying tackle/hugs, and hitting. I always have felt like kids were going to touch each other, no matter what you tell them. However, today I had a child bite another. I did not witness it, it happened on the bus. All of my students who were on the bus decided to come in and tell me. The biter was suspended from the bus and had to talk to the principal. I also told him that he had to write the child he bit an I'm Sorry note. I just don't know how to handle it. Is there a right and wrong way to address a kindergartener's need to be physical? Is it just their age? Or should I be concerned?
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It really is their age. Some stuff you do just have to let slide, although the potentially dangerous stuff shouldn't be written off - I would try looking for like a Franklin video that deals with personal space for them to watch.
ReplyDeleteAlso a management strategy that I found really helpful when I had kindies was 'The Pompoms'. Here's how it went: the kids sat on the rug in rows. Each row was a color, and I designated those as their teams. For times when the WHOLE row was following directions (in your case, keeping their hands to themselves), I gave that row a pompom in their designated jar. The kids were competing within the rows to fill up their jars, and they got to take home a bag of popcorn when they filled their jar. This kept them on task and they LOVED to keep each other accountable within their rows.
If you were to implement this (I know - one more week...not a lot of time), I would model what speaking nicely to a person in your row would look like, i.e. "Will you please keep your hands to yourself so we can earn a marble?"
Oh, kindergarten students! This summer I helped in a Getting Ready for Kindergarten classroom. These students were very physical. They were just starting kindergarten, so they were a little younger, plus these students were in summer school because their parents or preschool teachers were concerned about them starting kindergarten. So, many of them were pretty rambunctious. I was surprised at the amount of touching, pushing, shoving, hugging, tackling, and general physical contact between the students. I soon realized that students at that age have a very difficult time keeping their hands to themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think it is impossible for them to keep their hands to themselves all of the time, and it would take a lot of energy to constantly remind them to do so. I think one way to approach this would be to talk about appropriate physical contact or asking if they can hug/lean on/touch someone. Students could model appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The students probably shouldn’t be touching other student’s shoelaces, but if that keeps them from kicking another student, then I would be ok with it. While this sounds like a good way to deal with kindergarten students, I don’t know if they would be able to think about it that much before they impulsively touched their neighbors.
I have struggled with kindergartners touching, too!! My teacher has a strict no-touching policy and just clips anyone down immediately who touches someone in a hurtful way. If it's an accident, he simply has them apologize to the person that they hurt. The kind of touching I have been struggling with is the overly affectionate hugs. Sometimes kindergartners touch places they shouldn't and I don't want anyone to walk into my classroom and see that by mistake! I know they do not even realize what they're doing 90% of the time, but it still has me nervous. I have also had problems with kids being affectionate to get consolation when they do something bad. I have had to learn tough love more than anything this semester...and that's been really hard. Any tips for inappropriate affectionate touching?
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