day in my life as a kindergarten teacher | how to manage defiance & meltdowns

foreign [Music] good morning guys welcome back to my channel if you're new here thank you so much for being here I am a kindergarten teacher in the State of Florida and today we're doing a day in the life and today is Wednesday so in my district on Wednesdays we have short days which I am so thankful for I don't know how honestly I would have gotten through my first year teaching without these short days I don't know if other districts do that but I'm so thankful that my district does that I currently am setting up like my computer and I just put out all my kids morning work particularly our schedule on Wednesdays we have all our Core Curriculum in the mornings and then the kids go to straight to special area after recess and then we take them to lunch and after that we have like 30 minutes to do a little like science activity and then they go home so they're all out of here by 12 35 is when we start dismiss and so the afternoons usually we have I mean you'll see today we don't have any meetings which is great which is also why I decided to Vlog because I just have like more time I am going to eat my breakfast currently while I get ready and I had a little bit of coffee this morning which I realized though the Pod that I used is decaf so it's gonna be more of a mental thing than actually helping me but yeah I'm gonna set up my slides right now I started using slides I didn't use it my first like couple months teaching and I don't know how I didn't use it or didn't even think about the fact that I should use it but slides keeps me so organized it's so much easier I don't have to like go to new tabs to pull things up um but I'm gonna set that up and then I'm gonna eat my breakfast I have my coffee are you guys the type of teachers that wake up like hour before work because I'm not I wake up like 30 minutes before I need to leave and so then I just end up bringing my breakfast and also I'm like not that hungry when I wake up so today I just brought like a plain bagel with almond butter so I'm gonna eat that so I have a little bit of extra time this morning it's currently 7 19. it's so early it's so early when these kids come but kids are currently going into the morning teacher's room and we basically just rotate there's five people on my team and each week one person will have like all the kids that come here early start off in their room and just like put a little show on and then at 7 30 when the bell rings is when all my kids come into my room I find all my slides on slides go I can like write that here um they have a lot of different designs it's free um and it's just you know it's very easy to use so but yeah so I'm gonna do this and then my kids will come in and I'll talk to you guys during special area and then I feel like this past week has been so hectic like last week because we had all of our testing to do and now this week we're doing Dibbles testing so that's what I'm doing during like all my station time and we're just really getting to the end of the year today is May is it May 3rd today or May 2nd it's May 3rd I cannot believe that we're already in May my kids finished school on May 31st and I'm here until June 2nd but even then that's like I know it's gonna go by so fast and so I just cannot believe that my first year is almost over um but yeah I'll talk to you guys and check in during special area um have I had an interesting morning it is currently planning time it is 1103. we had a couple of meltdowns and I thought now would be a perfect time to share some of the tips I've learned over this first year teaching of basically like some some good old de-escalation strategies um that have actually helped me strategies for if you have students who have a hard time regulating emotions I can group this into like defiant students or students who are just having a really hard time calming down from having like a meltdown because I feel like going into my first year in kindergarten like I knew that these things would happen but I didn't know how often they would happen and so there's a couple things that really help so the first thing is giving the student choices and so this can be something as simple as like if a student is refusing to pick something up that they like through epic where you can say something like are you gonna pick these up by yourself or am I going to help you because then that really focuses in on okay you need to still do this task and I'm giving you options and I mean you can say like do you want somebody else to help you or do you want to pick it up and put it in this bag or do you want to pick it up and put it somewhere else it just like refocuses them on the task at hand and doesn't allow them to have any other option but completing that task the second thing that is really really helpful is first then statements are really crucial so let's say a student is refusing to do their work I really focus on first we are going to do our work and then you can do something that you want to do so an example could be first we're going to do our math workbook pages and then you can color or first we're going to do this and then you can have snack so for example like if you have a student who is having a really hard time calming down in like I've had situations where like students have like taken their shoes off and they're like having a full-blown temper tantrum um I'll just like in a very calm voice I will say first we need to put our shoes on and then we can like go play on the playground or first we need to put our shoes on and then we can get a snack first we can put on our shoes and then we can do this and you have to repeat it so many times I think that's something that I didn't really understand at first is that I would say the cons not the consequences I would say like with both of these tips I would say either the choices or I would say the first then statement and I would only say it like one time but you really have to say it like multiple times in order for the student for it to register and you say it like in a very soft voice and you have to be super super calm which is also really difficult when you have like a frustrating situation where you just like are trying to help a student and it's not getting through to them so those are my biggest tips right now I think also like doing any breath work with them like just trying to calm them down we always do breath work in the morning so I remind them I was like okay we're gonna try to do our breathing like we do in the morning to calm down it's going to help you feel better or even distracting them and talking about different things can help some students but it's also so specific to that student you kind of have to figure out like what is going to help the student calm down and if all else fails and you cannot get the situation under control and you have your whole class of 18 students that is when it is time to call for support from your behavior specialist at school or anything like that and and then I also really lean on parents so I will you know reach out to the parent I'll say hey like so and so I was having a difficult day is there anything I should be aware of like did we not have breakfast did we not sleep well last night like what's going on how is everyone doing just so that you can get some more information because it might just be something as simple as this kid needs to take a nap or this kid needs an extra snack um so those are some tips because I just kind of went through that and so I thought this would be a good time to share I'm just gonna like refocus on what I'm doing and get organized I think I'm just gonna do their yellow folders and then we have a super fun activity actually I'm going to tell you guys about this so we are doing a stem project and they basically are making I found this on teacher pay teachers and it's just like a stem activity where how can you design a maze for a marble we already did this whole layout together so they put their materials their team and their blueprint sketch of like what they wanted their maze to look like and then they're each going to get a paper plate some tape and straw to make their Maze and then I'm gonna give them marbles which I actually forgot that I need to look for the marble crowd that I forget about that part we might not even get to that so we might need to do the marbles and actually like the experiment when we get back like tomorrow um but yes I'm just gonna like rest and regroup myself for now all right hello it is the end of the day um it actually is already 2 31 so my kids were all gone and I finished car duty at about 105 and then I had a quick we had like a quick meeting with our team leader and we kind of just went through some of the important things that we needed to remember for the end of the year and we are going to do like a 10-day countdown with just like different themes each day so I kind of figured I could share those as just like ideas if you're looking for things to do towards the end of the year so we're gonna do and it's just like basically each day is like a fun little theme and not everything has to do with the theme it's more just like a fun little thing to do so one day we're gonna do bubbles and all the kids are just gonna get bubbles and like have time to play with them um we're gonna do an art day so there's this really great website where they can do directed drawing it's actually on YouTube I will write the name of it here because it is incredible and then we're gonna do a carnival day um which we're probably just gonna do some sort of like science experiment and then we're gonna do a camping day we might try to do solar ovens I don't know how like far out I'm gonna go for this like if I'm gonna decorate my room because I've seen a lot of like cute stuff on Pinterest but it takes a lot of time and energy to get my room decorated that way so we will see if I end up decorating my room or if I just like do fun like camping activities like we'd Turn All the Lights Off and like have flashlights and read books and just things like that and then we're gonna do an animal day and ocean day a summer day a glow day which is like we might try to do a black light party and then the day before the last day of school we're gonna do a choice day where kind of like the kids just get to decide what they want to do for the day so they'll like have some choices so they can kind of like act as the teacher but not really and on that day we um another one of my like members of my team she has them like get shaving cream and like clean their tables and like do fun stuff like that um and then the last day of school we're gonna do a movie day so also in my district we the last like three days of school I believe are short days so the schedule that I have today is the schedule that I'll have on those days which will be nice to um just get the kids out earlier so that I can do everything that I need to do to wrap up the end of the year clean out my closet organize things and just like get everything set for like closing the school down so those are a couple of ideas um in case you guys are curious as to like what we plan for the end of the year I'm just going based off of like what my team usually does and then they usually like will share some resources so that just makes it easier on my end especially being a first year teacher um I I might try to like rearrange some things and do things my own way of course but that's the overall plan and then I just did a little bit of grading so I need to file all of those I have like a big um organizer where it has all of the student's name and that's where I put all their work in it and then on Fridays I put it in their folders I used to try to put work in there every single day and I was like why am I doing this so now I just switched to um having more of like an organized system and then I can just like grab it from their folder and put it in their yellow folder um on Friday so that I'm not doing like spending all my planning time organizing paper the other thing that I wanted to share with you guys is that I actually found this on teacher pay teachers it's like a free resource and it is a first grader in training badge let me show you and like you could also make this like whatever way you want to and basically what I'm going to do um it says at the bottom like ask me how I got this badge I'm going to use I have so many of these and each color so let's say like red each student will get a red sticker if they can line up quietly orange could be for like raising their hand yellow could be for completing their work green could be for like working quietly at station time knowing how to do their Transitions and those are just things that they need to know to go to first grade so once they get I'm going to put the stickers um basically like all lined up in these spots and then once they get all their stickers and they're gonna wear these like during the day and then I'm just gonna keep them here once they get all their stickers then they will get a reward so that's just gonna help I think with classroom management at the end of the year but like I said I'm just gonna like keep them on this clipboard but I have so many of these stickers so I was like it's a good way to use things that I already have but I'm gonna go ahead and just like get organized I have about 10 minutes until I'm gonna get going um I have a couple makeup tests I need to do with kids we started our end of the year Dibbles testing so I'm gonna be focusing on that tomorrow and yeah I just didn't take that organized I have all my kids morning work already set up on their tables I did want to mention that on Wednesdays I am super super lucky because there is one of our like teacher assistants she comes and she helps me just like make copies and just help with like random things around the classroom which is incredible because there's so many things that like things just take a lot of time um but yeah I'm super good for that so like if you're able to have that that's incredible um or even like parent volunteers could come and do that for you if you know you lean on those resources that you have I'm gonna put these away we're going to start this next Monday so I'm gonna put that in my Monday cubby I'm sure I've shared this in other videos but over here is like my teacher stuff and these are like um but it's called drawers with each name on it this is like some teacher copies of things I have a substitute binder I have a teacher resource binder and I have a student data binder so those are the things that keep me organized you guys are currently sitting on my treasure box I don't really know what my plans are this afternoon um I haven't had tutoring this week so I've had a little bit of extra time to myself which is nice yeah let me just get organized and we'll keep going out of here on time today because Monday and Tuesday I stayed here a little bit later just to get organized but today like it's 2 38 right now contract times ends at 2 45 so I'm going to stick to it and get going like right now thank you boba why are you guys freaking out if I don't get my bubba in three minutes I'm gonna pass out [Music] foreign [Music] I usually don't go here but he's in town so we decided to come here and we're just doing shoulders today yesterday we did back and buys and we went to like the big gym that I go to and he used to guest pass um but yeah I stopped working out here because it really just it's a tiny like shoebox of a gym and I just like mentally needed to be around people um so let's get into the workout also side note this outfit it's from Amazon it's very sunny very fun foreign [Music]

Channel: Cristina Himelhoch

Views: 75,592

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Id: AHNRNPRQZYU

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023