We are more than teachers, as you know, we do so much more. But one of our biggest jobs is actually detective, because behavior is communication. When kids are misbehaving or having big behaviors, they are trying to communicate with us.
~ Zeba from Episode 109 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
If you’ve ever felt at a loss for how to support a student who cries over everything… or melts down in frustration when things don’t go their way… this episode is for you.
In today’s episode, I’m sharing two real-life case studies of students with big emotions and big reactions and how I’ve supported them in the moment and over time using a combination of observation, behavior analysis, and social-emotional teaching strategies.
In this episode I share:
- What to look for when tracking disruptive behaviors
- How to identify what a student’s behavior is really communicating
- Ideas for breaks, routines, and visual supports that actually help
- What to say (and not say) when a student has an emotional outburst
- How to teach size-of-the-problem and emotional regulation skills
- The difference between quick fixes and long-term support
Related Episodes:
- How to Teach Emotional Intelligence in Kindergarten ~ Ep. 108
- De-Escalation Strategies to Stay Calm and In Control During Emotional Outbursts with Sara Yessenow ~ Ep. 64
- What to Do When a Child Won’t Stop Crying ~ Ep. 26
- Setting Up A Calm Down Corner For Your Classroom ~ Ep. 100
Learn More:
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hello, teacher friends. It’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and today I want to build off of last week’s episode where I talked about teaching emotional intelligence to your students, and I want to continue with my case studies this year. So remember, the last case study, I said that I wanted to try this year doing a little bit different of a format for the podcast every so often to include case studies. And I’m recording this before I give you all a chance to write in with your case studies. But going forward, if you have case studies that you want me to talk about on the podcast, I would love to hear from you. It’s much more, I think it’s more meaningful when the scenarios come from you. But today’s case study is a situation that I have had. So I do feel like I can just sort of talk about how I’ve handled it. But going forward, if you have situations, you can bring it forward to me in an email or a DM. And then I can talk about on the podcast so people can hear how I would solve those problems or what I would suggest to you. And I think that could benefit a lot of teachers. So like I said, this is building off of teaching emotional intelligence. This is supporting a child who has really big emotions. What would I do? OK, I actually have a couple of different scenarios, how I would handle them. So let’s let’s jump in.
[1:24] You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[2:15] First, these are all made of names, all made of names. So first situation is a student, Emily, is frequently interrupting others, maybe calls out during lessons, maybe gets up from her seat to walk around the classroom during work time. And her behavior definitely escalates when she’s frustrated, often ending in loud outbursts and sometimes even throwing objects like something that she’s working on, ripping up her page that she’s working on. First thing that I want to do when I’m starting to see misbehaviors, anytime I’m seeing misbehaviors, is observe. Observe time of day and not just observe with my eyes, write it down. Keep data. Keep track of when these behaviors are happening, like when in the day or which kinds of activities. Like, is it always during literacy or is it always after lunch? Is it specifically during transitions or is it after like 15 minutes of work? Things like that. So record how often it’s happening, when it’s happening, the context of when it’s happening. Like I said, the kind of activity and then do some analyzing of it. So because us as teachers, we are more than teachers, as you know, we do so much more. But one of our biggest jobs is actually detective.
[3:37] Because behavior is communication. When kids are misbehaving or having big behaviors, they are trying to communicate with us in a way that they can. And it’s our job because it might not always be, hey, I’m mad or I’ve lost interest in this. Like it’s not verbally telling us what’s wrong. It’s their behavior that’s telling us what’s wrong. And so we need to be detectives and figure out what it is their behavior is trying to communicate to us and how can we then support the child with that. So that means observing. And analyzing the behaviors. It means that nothing’s going to get fixed right away. And I think that’s really important to know that like when kids are having big behaviors, if there’s something that you do that like fixes the behavior right away, it’s not permanent. They will still have the behaviors. You need a long-term solution and that takes time and that takes patience. But over time, you’ll see progress. And so that’s like an important mindset to go into it of like the first time that Emily has this behavior, I’m not going to fix it once and forever.
[4:35] And okay, a little caveat to that. Maybe Emily just didn’t know that she’s supposed to stay sitting in her seat on the rug. So okay, I can tell her what it is I’m expecting, and maybe that’s all it takes. But if you see the behaviors happening again and again, then the kids need more than just a quick fix. You need to figure out what’s causing this behavior. So analyzing her behavior, I’m noticing that Emily is struggling with impulse control, and sustaining attention. So it’s usually like during an activity, she’ll work for a little bit and then she becomes distracted and struggles to sit still. And she does get frustrated very easily because she’s getting distracted.
[5:15] Her ability to do some of the work independently and correctly, she struggles with that. And so she needs help. And so instead of asking for help, she gets frustrated and rips up the paper or yells or throws things, right? So one of the things that I would want to try is giving her breaks. So if I know that after like about 5-10 minutes of working, she is getting frustrated, what if I set a timer for her and say, let’s do this for 5 minutes and then you can take a walk? Or you do this for 5 minutes and then you can play a game for five minutes.
[5:53] Something that I want to think about what would be motivating to Emily. The thing with kids that struggle with sustaining attention or impulse control is you do want to have times in the day where breaks are not earned. They are automatically given because otherwise they might not get that break and they need that break. Right. So like every day and figure out like when it is in the day that’s most she’s most falling apart so it’s usually let’s say it’s usually after lunch during writing okay so every day halfway through writing you’re going to go to emily and say okay you’ve earned your break or not earned because i said this one isn’t earned you can have earned breaks too but okay it’s time for your break go take a walk or it’s time for your break go play with this activity again it’s finding out what’s meaningful to her if you have a little trampoline in the hallway or something or jumping like a little exercise corner that she can do with like a jump exercise routine like jumping jacks push-ups things like that she could do that but even as simple as just a walk is great and you’d be surprised at how quickly just having these breaks.
[7:00] Helps Emily to not get so frustrated and to not lose her cool, right? So she still might struggle with sustaining attention, but because you’ve built in these breaks, she’s not getting as frustrated and she’s not like yelling, right? Or throwing things. And to me, when you think about all the things she’s doing, calling out on the rug, getting up out of her seat, none of those compare to the significance of throwing things and yelling things and ripping things when she’s upset. So we want to support the most extreme behaviors first before we get to the more minor ones. And so having those breaks in place for her is a great strategy to start. You can also give her like a little visual or something that says like help please and so she can bring it to an adult when she wants help with something or she can put it on her desk so we know to go check in with her.
[7:52] Whatever you’re trying, you want to try it for enough time, a couple of weeks to see if it does in fact help. Like it’s not going to help right away, but you could even do a little reward. Like if you’re frustrated and you ask for help, I will, you know, give you a token. And after five tokens, you can earn a play break. Do I do this with every student? No. But Emily’s having some extreme behaviors and really disrupting the class with her yelling and ripping up of the papers and throwing dice. And so this is a strategy to get her to practice using the skill of asking for help once she gets really good at asking for help then i can change the reward a little bit so it’s not like every time you ask for help you get to earn this reward but every time you complete an activity or every time you know you up it so every time you whenever you ask for help five times then you get a token and you need five tokens to cash in or something, something like that. You just up the amount of time or the amount of tokens needed before they trade in. So after several weeks, you can observe and, you know, observe how the things you’re trying are working. And again, I don’t think I mentioned this. You don’t want to try a million things at once. You want to go slowly, which again is adding to my point of it’s not a quick fix, right? But if you try something.
[9:14] All these things at once, you’re not going to really know which one’s being effective or if any of them are being effective. So try with the like mandatory scheduled breaks, not mandatory, but try with the scheduled breaks and then try adding in like an earned break, you know, by asking for help because that seems to be her struggle is she’s having a hard time with something, but she’s not doesn’t know how to ask for help. Right. And she also struggles with sustaining attention. And so after 10 minutes, she really has trouble sitting in her seat and doing the activity that you’re asking of her. So giving her those breaks helps her with that. And then teaching her to ask for help will help with the frustration. And at the same time, you’re teaching the whole class the self-regulation techniques that we talked about in the last episode. You’re using the calm corner for kids that need it. And so these are all things that Emily is benefiting from as well. Over time, she’s learning these strategies and practicing these strategies. So that’s Emily. Here’s another scenario for you. Susie. Susie cries over every little thing. If someone gets to the rug before her, she cries. If she doesn’t know how to do an activity, she cries. If she loses a game, she cries.
[10:30] If she doesn’t get called on, she cries. And so clearly her communication, her behavior is communicating that she needs strategies for identifying the size of the problem and how to handle our reactions to our emotions. So she needs explicit lessons in whether something is a small problem, a medium problem, or a big problem. And once you’ve talked about that a lot with her and the whole class, you want to talk about, well, what can we do if we have a small problem? And you want to go through, you explicitly want to teach her and the class strategies for handling those small problems. So you want to go through different scenarios. What if someone took my pencil? And you can be like fun and playful about what if someone took my pencil? Should I cry?
[11:17] Should I say, no, I don’t take my pencil. And they’ll see how ridiculous it is, especially when you dramatize it. And they’ll be like, no, no, you know, use your words and say, can I have my pencil back and so then you act it out and you act out asking for the pencil back and then gets a pencil back and you can say oh great I have my pencil back you can teach them strategies about being flexible and regulating their motions like we’ve talked about but over time Susie will learn, how to handle those small problems and then when you get to that scenario of she’s crying because she lost the game you can say wait a minute is this a small problem a media problem or a big problem. Like this is assuming you’ve already taught them this explicitly. You’ve given them chances to practice it. Now you need it in the moment. So you can say, is this a small problem? And Susie can say, yes, it is. And you can say, okay, so what can we do about it? Be flexible.
[12:14] Okay, great. Let’s be flexible. Why don’t we say, can we play again? Or can we play a different game? And then she’ll, because you’ve given her the words, she can then say that to her partner. Can we play a different game? And her partner can say yes. And then Susie can be fine. Or if she’s really upset, you can send her to the comm corner. You’re having a really big reaction to this small problem. mom.
[12:39] Why don’t you take a minute in the control spot and then come right back? And you send her to the, I call it the control spot, the calm corner. You send her to the calm corner and you don’t talk to her about it. Because what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to make a big deal about these big outbursts because that will give her a lot of attention and that will reinforce worse that doing these big reactions and big behaviors gets me one-on-one teacher time. So just as nonchalantly, like no judgment, just say, you’re really upset. Go to the calm corner and then don’t talk to her about it.
[13:17] Don’t go over there. Maybe after a minute say, okay, time’s up, come on out and let’s get back to work. And like, don’t even talk about it. If she’s really someone that’s upset all the time over every little thing, that’s a strategy because clearly she’s learned that crying gets her what she wants and whatever that is like attention with the adult winning the game getting the piece she wanted and you don’t want to teach her okay yeah crying does get you what you want so again this comes from observing how often this is happening when this is happening observing how she reacts to you when you say oh what’s wrong you know like does that escalate it? Does saying go to the control spot and then ignoring it? Does that make it better? It’s about observing, analyzing, and trying strategies out and reevaluating and seeing how are the strategies working. But these are all done at the same time as you teaching explicitly social emotional skills.
[14:15] Kids need both. They need in that moment support and then they need explicit instruction just like they need explicit instruction in teaching you know phonics and math they need to have that explicit social emotional instruction so that when they need it they have that background they have the resources so those are two different kind of case studies for helping kids with big emotions and like i said let me know if you have a case study you want me to address on the podcast and i would love to talk about it for other teachers and talk about how i would handle it. In the show notes, I’m linking a really awesome guest episode I did with my friend Sarah Yesenow on what to do during emotional outbursts. And I also want to highlight that this exact scenario is the final scenario in my social emotional challenge. Social emotional challenge is a week-long free challenge. It’ll start on the Monday after whenever you sign up, and it will send you a week each day, a different like common problem that teachers see, and then a quick win to solve it, but also resources to help you with that longer term support like we talked about in this episode. So definitely check that out if you want more support. Check out the other episode that I’m going to link.
[15:31] And stay tuned for next week where I’m going to be answering a question I get a lot, which is, how do you handle teacher burnout when you’re handling kids like the Emily and Susie that we talked about today? And that is a big one that I get from teachers. So if that’s you, if you’re feeling very empty and drained from behaviors, definitely check out next week’s episode.
[15:59] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies if you liked this episode the best ways to show your support are to subscribe leave a review or send it to a friend i’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips see you then.