11 Ways to Help Kids Manage Stress

At Children’s Choice, one of the outcomes we are trying to achieve with kids is that they develop skills for managing stress, coping with feelings, and being resilient when bad things happen in life.  How do we do this?

1. Power of Play
We make time for play. Play is not a four-letter word. Well, actually it is, but that’s not the point. Play is not a frill. It is a powerful tool for managing stress. Play gets the brain to release powerful neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that counteract stress.  Play creates a sense of belonging and fosters cooperation. Play supports social, intellectual, and language development. Play builds confidence, and relieves stress. So, we bring “FUNERGY” to the job!

2. Confidence through Enrichment
Confidence is a skill that is a necessary building block for developing self-control and the ability to solve stressful problems. Often, kids who are struggling in traditional school subjects suffer from a lack of confidence, which inhibits their ability to solve problems and increases stress in difficult situations. When children have the opportunity to be involved in activities like drama, team-building, music, cooking, sports, gardening, dance, and art, they learn that there are many things they might be good at in addition to the more traditional school subjects. Through these experiences they gain the ability to approach challenges with more confidence.
 

3. Role Models who Fail
Adults make mistakes. Sometimes adults hide this fact from children or blame others when they make a mistake. At CC, we are trained in the value of recognizing mistakes, admitting mistakes, and learning from mistakes. When we make a mistake, we acknowledge the mistake so the kids can hear us saying, “Oops” or “My bad.” Then we come up with a strategy to fix our problems, and talk about the lessons we learned. We very intentionally do all of this out loud, so children can hear how responsible adults handle it when we make mistakes.
 
4. Permission to Make Mistakes
We give kids permission to make mistakes.  Mistakes are part of life, and are valuable to the learning process. Some of the strongest learning moments happen when people make mistakes.  When kids make mistakes, staff don’t shame them, or punish them. We say, “That’s okay, try it again.” We say, “hit the reset button and try a different solution.”

5. Name that Feeling
We help children identify feelings by labeling or naming the emotion out loud. “I see that your face is red and you are breathing very fast. It looks like you are angry. What’s happening?” or “I can tell you are upset right now. You look very sad. Would you like to talk about it?”

6. Listen, just listen.
When we do get kids to open up and talk to us, we don’t interrupt. We let them finish. We don’t “make them wrong” or disagree, especially when they are talking about their feelings. You won’t hear our staff say, “You shouldn’t get angry about that” or “That is not something to get upset about.”

7. Acknowledge Super Powers
We don’t attempt to control kids. Instead we help them develop what psychologists call an Inner Locus of Control. We teach kids to recognize their feelings, and to understand that feelings are not good or bad, but that they have control over their actions and how they behave when they feel a certain way. When kids say things like, “Ryan made me hit him,” we challenge this by asking “Would it be more accurate to say, you felt angry and chose to hit Ryan?”

We intentionally teach children these steps to coping when bad stuff happens. 

Help them C.O.P.E.

8.   C = Calm.
This is all about arousal control. We teach them breathing techniques like taking a series of slow breaths in through their nose and even slower breaths out through their mouth. We teach them progressive muscle relaxation exercises like first tensing and then relaxing their muscles starting at their toes and ending with the muscles in their faces.

9.   O = Options.
We encourage them to stop, take a breath, and relax before reacting to the situation. We know the longer they delay before reacting, the longer of a list of options they can create. The more options they can create, the more likely they are to come up with an effective and appropriate response. , Frontal Lobe takes the keys, Self Talk, Break it Down, Generate Long Lists, Brainstorm, Visualization and Mental Rehearsal Making a long list of strategies,

10.   P = Problem Solving
The next step is picking a strategy and putting one into practice.  Try it out and see if it works. We teach them to acknowledge that the situation stinks, to acknowledge how they feel about it, make a list of possible solutions, then pick one. One of our useful phrases is, “That stinks, now… what can we do to MAKE THE BEST OF IT?”

11.   E = Evaluate
After picking a problem-solving strategy and trying it out, look back and see if it worked. We ask, “Did that work?”  “What part didn’t work so well?” “If you could go back and try it again, what strategy do you think you might pick this time?”

More than STEM: Creating Community through STEM Classes

Creating a Sense of Belonging

In our afterschool STEM classes, we DO want to increase knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math… but even more importantly… after-school, we want to inspire a positive attitude toward school and learning in general; we want to teach intrapersonal and interpersonal social skills; we want to create a sense of community and a feeling of attachment and belonging.

How do we do this? We make it fun; we make it bigger; we give it class; we do it right!

We invest class time in relationships and teambuilding. We create rituals that build a sense of belonging. We make learning playful because we know PLAY is fertile ground for growing imagination and creativity. We make learning playful because PLAY fosters a sense of belonging and encourages teamwork. We make learning playful because PLAY is our brain’s favorite way to learn.

We create rituals because we know that RITUALS create a sense of belonging.  Here are our Top 3 rituals for creating a sense of belonging in our STEM classes.

STEM Chants:

We provide semester-long or year-long STEM classes at every one of our schools. We begin every new STEM class by teaching and celebrating all of the awesome things that STEM has done for mankind.  Science has helped us to eradicate diseases, help animals, and understand our world. Technology has helped us develop all kinds of tools to help make our lives easier, more productive, and more convenient. Engineering has helped us to create better forms of transportation, better bridges, and better machines. Math has helped us to solve complex problems, discover new knowledge, and predict complicated results. We brainstorm on all of the awesome ways that all of the STEM-related fields have worked together to make life better. 

Then we set up the STEM chant ritual. We tell the kids that whenever we say “STEM is…” that we want them to respond with “…Awesome!” We do this loudly and quietly. We use this call and response as a way to get the attention of the kids whenever we need to ask a question, give an instruction, or see if they are ready to move on to the next activity. We do this frequently in every class for the entire year or semester. The kids are conditioned like Pavlovian Dogs to say “Awesome!” whenever someone says, “STEM is…”

STEM Names & the STEM Name Game:

Players think of a STEM-related term that begins with the same letter as their first name (with younger children, any STEM name will do).  Then they go around the circle, introducing themselves by their STEM name and first name.  Chemical Chelesa, Microbial Mike, Atomic Adeline, Multiplication Madison, etc.  We like to pause on the first day and quickly discuss the definition of each new STEM term (sneaking in a little vocabulary). Then we repeat, but this time the first player says their own name, the second player says the first player’s and their own name, the third player says the first two people’s name and their own name, and so on…until the last player attempts to say everyone’s name in order ending with their own name.  Repeat this time going the opposite direction.  Each time we use each other’s name in discussion throughout the duration of the year or semester, we use our new science names. This creates a special sense of community and feeling of belonging to our special STEM group.

STEM Shirts:

At the beginning of each semester, we make Sharpie Science Shirts. We print up plain white t-shirts with the organization’s logo for only a few dollars per shirt. We make small designs about the size of a quarter on white t-shirts.  Then we drop rubbing alcohol on the designs very slowly.  The alcohol spreads across the fibers of the t-shirt and acts as a SOLVENT on the Sharpie ink – producing nice bursts of color.  We talk about the meaning of words like disSOLve, and SOLution, SOLid, SOLubility, and SOLvent.  It is a science of SOL – tie dyed t-shirt. Kids frequently wear their shirts on STEM class days. Plus as a grand finale’ – at the end of each semester, we take a special science-related field trip and everyone wears their STEM shirts. 

Lego Movie Literacy

Lego’s are fun. The Lego Movie that was released this year added even more excitement to the classic building toy. Our idea was to create a Lego class that challenged kids to practice their literacy skills by writing a story – the classic hero’s journey.

The first step was character development. We asked the kids to draw their hero and describe the character’s personality by telling us if their character was good, or bad, or both, what their character liked to do as a job or a hobby, what the character wanted to achieve, what fears or obstacles could make it difficult for the character to achieve the big goal, and what traits, strengths, and skills can help the character achieve the goal?

Then we worked on the setting: We challenged the kids to “paint a picture of the setting… using words.” Where and when will the events of the story happen? 

• Describe the place… Examples: the forest; the school; our town; or on another planet. 
• Describe the location… Examples: beside the big oak tree; on the playground, near the zoo, or by the Purple Sea of Enselor. 
• Describe the objects in the setting… Examples: mushrooms, the twirly slide, the koala bear enclosure, or the statue of the alien hero. 
• Describe the time… Examples: morning, midnight, or dusk; in the present day, past, or future. 
• Describe the weather… Examples: stormy, clear sky, muggy, hot.

We asked them to use descriptive and exciting words to describe each place. We challenged them to use great “kicked up” adjectives (hot/cold, bright/dark, dirty/clean, gloomy/cheerful, simple/elegant, colorful/faded, modern/old fashioned, luxurious/simple, threatening/tranquil).  But we also challenged them to “NOT make their adjectives DO ALL THE WORK” – instead of simply saying that the forest is gloomy – DESCRIBE what gloomy looks like, sounds like, and feels like. The dark forest was wet and a little bit cold, and the wind sounded like the trees were trembling and weeping.

Then we simply walked them through the process of telling the hero’s journey by having them come up with at least three problems or challenges that the hero would need to overcome and a creative, unexpected, or funny way of solving each problem.

Finally, we asked them to write a grand finale’. Tell the story of whether the Character wins or loses, reaches the goal or fails. Is there a moral to the story? If their character succeeds, this is a comedy; when the character fails, this is a tragedy. We challenged them not to just cut the story off, but to “wrap it up with a nice BOW.”

The kids thought about their stories as they build scenes and props with Legos, and worked on their stories at home. When they were happy with their stories, we snuck in a little technology education. We taught them to use stop-animation and green screen technology to create their own Lego Movies.

Here is a good example. As you watch, listen for character development, setting description, problems, solutions, and the grand finale’. Enjoy!

You can download the materials we gave the kids to help them at www.ashcraftafterschool.com/lovinlearnin.html

Constellations: Kids Create their Own

This is a fun, literacy activity we invented by accident - born out of imagination and a constellation conversation.

We were talking about stars and the groups of stars that form patterns when viewed from Earth - constellations. We talked about the 88 different constellations listed by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy.

We talked about some of the more famous constellations like the Big Dipper and Orion.

Then we began talking about how when we look at stars we can see other patterns that may look like animals, mythological creatures, people, or inanimate objects such as a microscope or a heart.

We gave the kids some black paper and foil stars and let them create artwork based on constellations from their imaginations. To sneak in a little literacy, they all wrote a paragraph about their imagination constellations.

We decided we could kick these projects up a notch by making them GLOW! We have the kids some fluorescent markers and paints and let them do their projects under a black light. This was an instant hit.

We have learned that it is a little easier to use WHITE paper and standard highlighter markers. The florescent colors show up much better on white paper and the highlighters are easier for children to write with (and less expensive) than florescent paint.

The kids LOVE writing their own florescent messages. 

This one is GLOWING literally and figuratively – GLOWING!

Educated Guess Guessing Jar

Educated Guess Guessing Jar

Fill containers (varying sizes and shapes) with balloons, beans, baubles, or anything that will fit.  Children begin by making a guess, but then they refine their guesses by measuring and estimating. 

Don’t tell them to measure, just ask them how they could refine their estimations and let them figure it out.  Measure the container and calculate volume estimates. 

Give them some of whatever you use in the mystery container and some empty containers of varying sizes to experiment and estimate with.

On Monday's we count the previous week's jar and find out who the winner is. On the day of the announcement, kids volunteer to help count the previous week's jar (and practice their math skills).

It's usually a privilege if you get picked to help as one of the counters and we try to pick kids that have done positive things in their community over the past week. During our round-up (community meeting) the community does a drumroll and cheers when the winner is announced. They get to take home whatever the prize in the jar is. 

We vary what we put in the jar to try and get both small and large numbers of things that relate to our theme of the month – pumpkin seeds during fall harvest theme, balloons during hot air balloon fiesta theme, or pieces of gravel during our Science Rocks monthly theme.  

Stop! Get Your Geometry On!

Afterschool Rap Videos

Creating rap videos is a great way to engage kids in meaningful and pleasurable learning. 

This is a great strategy afterschool programs can use to promote and support literacy, reinforce school-day learning, and in this case... teach important math concepts.

Anyone who knows us also knows that creating a rap video is outside of our typical "box" but that we also love to BLOW UP the box. 

The word RAP doesn't immediately come to mind when you look at either one of us. RAP means Rhythm And Poetry. 

We used a website... www.rhymezone.com to help us write the rhyme. Then our kids ran with the idea and created a great rap video. Check it out. 

Based on the Common Core State Standard in math... "Identify and describe shapes... squares, circles, triangles, rectangles, hexagons... "

Please share, like, and comment on YouTube! 

FilmCamp Facilitates FUNdamentals

Film classes and camps directly teach about technology and design and also facilitate the development of literacy skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

We have been having a blast with our film classes this year. Enjoy this great example.

Title:  The Haunted School

Description:  Students learned what makes suspense in movies.  They were then given the challenge to make a movie that would actually build suspense in the audience.  They brainstormed ideas, and made an outline of the movie.  They also wrote dialogue for all the characters. They did their own make-up and gathered props and costumes.  During production, students took turns directing and filming scenes.

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