What do we celebrate in May?

Last year we talked about May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Month!

It’s really important that we educate ourselves and honor all the cultures that we are blessed to have around us. MORE importantly, we must share what we learn with our children and teach them that we change and grow our whole lives, and that learning is a huge part of that.

Check out this Award Winning Children’s Book ISLAND BORN that we would like to add to our list!

SPEAKING OF LEARNING: What Else do we celebrate in May??

MAY IS AMERICAN CHEESE MONTH!!!!

This one may seem pretty CHEESY, but if you want to get your young eater to try new foods, celebrating with a THEMED MEAL can be the ticket! You could make dips, pizzas, fondue, desserts! They could grate it into cheesy confetti and put it on tacos!

Hey… that’s an idea! Why don’t you read DRAGONS LOVE TACOS or SPACE MICE or THE GREAT CHEESE ROBBERY while you snack on cheese and crackers with a picnic!

Here are tons more CHEESE RELATED kids books to add to your bookshelf of life long favorites.

You can also try asparagus DIPPED in cheese… because May is also NATIONAL ASPARAGUS MONTH!!!

MAY IS JEWISH AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH

There are so many ways to learn about our Jewish friends, family members, and neighbors. You can find amazing events and learning opportunities here everywhere from the National Archives and National Gallery of Art to the Holocaust Museum and Library of Congress.

One of our favorite ways to teach our kids is, of course, cooking together. A full-body, multi-sense experience with quality time and learning baked right in is the perfect way to instill lifelong lessons and love for other cultures.

Here are 20 traditional recipes you can cook with your kiddos. Latkes, Chocolate Babka, Bagels and Lox, Savory Potato Knishes with Caramelized Onions, there are so many amazing foods that you can make on this list! While making these yummy treats, you can discuss the importance of these foods and what they represent to Jewish Culture.

There are also several amazing Jewish Heritage children’s books Listed Here. Some of our favorite titles include: Here is the World, Koala Challah, Lights Out Chabbat, and, and Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins.

MAY IS MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS MONTH

The best part about learning and practicing Conscious Discipline for our classrooms is that we are learning so much about how to take care of our own mental and emotional health. It is important to support and honor our feelings and the feelings of our children to promote mental health!

You can practice Deep Breathing together! Diaphragmatic breathing can help bring a person into a calmer state, and more able to face friction and problem solve. We have a post about Breathing on a Tropical Island that can help you out!

You can also take the time each day to talk about all of the things you felt, good and bad, and how you got through it. Let them speak, take your turn to speak, and sit in close proximity to one another. Just knowing that our emotions are valid and supported by loved ones can be a huge boost.

We use the NINJA LIFE HACKS series in our classrooms to help explain complex feelings and emotions to our preschool and kindergarten kids. We highly recommend them all!

MAY IS NATIONAL FOSTER CARE MONTH

Families come in all shapes and sizes. What we recommend most of all is to instill this in your children. Talk about how families come in all shapes and sizes! Talk about adoption and foster children. Talk about expanded families and families with one parent and families with two mommies or two daddies.

Explain what foster care really means: There is great need for loving foster families for these children in need of stability, and that fostering is a temporary arrangement. Keep the conversation where your children can understand based on their age.

Kids Need to be Safe and The Foster Dragon are two incredible kids books that can answer a lot of questions, provide perspective, and inspire empathy in kids who may have never met a child in foster care before!

MAY IS NATIONAL BIKE MONTH

We have been using our new strider bikes out on the playground with the older preschool kids, and they could not be more thrilled! The weather is getting warmer and Reston is FULL of incredible bike trails. Take this month to turn off the tv and GO OUTSIDE to explore! Remember to go over Bike Safety with your kids, including the importance of wearing a helmet, sticking with your grownup, and keeping your listening ears on!

What other things do you all celebrate in May? How do you celebrate? Let us know in the comments!!

Conscious Discipline Spotlight: Clearing up Misconceptions

Social-Emotional Learning has been on the rise in schools since the nineties, and we at Common Ground are eager to continue that trend.

As many of you know, we have been learning and promoting the study and lifestyle of Conscious Discipline as a center. We have been taking and retaking the courses (Ms. Victoria is on her second time through! I personally listen to the audio and then watch the videos to help get a firmer grasp on the subject matter) in order to appropriately apply the lessons to all of our classrooms. We hope to encourage our parents to take the course with us in time (stay tuned!) so that we can teach our kiddos how to speak confidently and kindly with their hearts.

Teaching with Love is much more powerful and long lasting than Teaching with Fear.

But sadly, this is a rather new concept in education and parenting, and it’s receiving backlash from those who refuse to grow themselves.

This article came out today. It brought to our attention some arguments against Social Emotional Learning programs in schools. The immediate and long-lasting benefits of teaching your child the inner disciplines of emotional self-awareness and problem solving through empathy are essential to our growth as a species, so I would personally like to clear up some of the misconceptions presented.

All learning begins at birth. Children begin learning the second they open their eyes. Everything is new and without context, so they turn to their caregivers for guidance. Children begin mimicking and responding to parents and teachers as early as three months. No Small Matter is an eye-opening documentary all about the essential roll early childhood educators play in the lives of children, starting with newborns. How you interact with babies, when you interact with babies, what responses you give to different emotions and behaviors, children absorb these calls and responses, these cause and effect relationships, like little sponges. Learning to calm yourself, learning to deal with frustration, learning how to communicate those feelings and frustrations in an appropriate way with peers and adults, all of this begins to happen before the age of 2. They have friends they “parallel play” with starting at 18 months. They are playing WITH each other by the age of 3. Imagine how overwhelming a disagreement with a friend is when you have all the social tools you have now can be.

There are parents who are questioning the validity of these emotional regulation practices and their usefulness in elementary school. They even suggested the notion that Guidance Counselors in grade school are an invasive waste of money. If children primarily learn through social interaction with adults and peers, how could giving them the tools to navigate those interactions with clear communication and confidence be anything but essential?

Awareness is not Encouragement. One of the arguments against SEL is the notion that it makes kids face social issues they “don’t need to know about yet.” They are even using the scare tactic that SEL “advertises suicide.” Making a child aware of their feelings can only be helpful. It gives their anxieties and frustrations names. It encourages them to untangle their thoughts and focus on keeping calm.
Becoming aware of problems in the world and personal stressors does not make them manifest, it simply sheds a light of what’s already there. Children primarily learn how to interact with their world by watching adults interact with each other, not how adults interact with them personally. They know so much more than we give them credit for. Conversely, trying to hide or dismiss their feelings does not make them any less real, and only encourages them to hide/bury any issues they have. These don’t go away, they just get expressed as anger and distrust down the line. Mental and Emotional Health issues are not on the rise, we are simply becoming more aware of them. We are seeing the multi-generational effects they have on entire families and communities. Social Emotional Learning SAVES lives because we are learning about these toxic behaviors that have defined our teaching for so long. Instead of trying to hide them again, we should be working to eradicate them once and for all.

Emotional stress affects academic achievement. A child that cannot calm down is a distracted learner. A child that fights with their peers is a disruptive learner. A child that is afraid to fail is a stressed learner. A child who thinks their only value comes from achievement and academic prowess will do anything they can to achieve perfection. If they do not have a safe space to express their negative feelings and sort through their fears, they will find other outlets in the form of one addiction or another. Conscious Discipline has been recognized by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP), which promotes the adoption of scientifically established behavioral health interventions. Social Emotional Learning is key in helping avoid substance abuse in children. The notion that “children should only focus on their academic progress” is privileged, because some children do not have a choice. Acknowledging that their are factors in a child’s life that matter besides academics is just acknowledging reality.

Your child is not raised in a vacuum. I am a parent. I am a teacher. I am slowly becoming trained in Conscious Discipline. I am still not everything my children need, and I do not pretend to be. My children have been nurtured by trained childhood education professionals. They have been taught by teachers with a strong background in education. I love them with all my heart, but I am not a trained counselor. I am not a history teacher, a math teacher, a science teacher. I am a single, biased human being. I am so incredibly fortunate that my children have a fleet of adults who can teach them so many things I can’t. A lot of these parents are arguing that the emotional and mental health “stuff” should all be dealt with at home. Just holding that belief implies that those lessons and obstacles are private matters to be hidden or ashamed of. Learning how to treat your friends and how to talk to your loved ones in times of friction or stress is JUST as essential as learning your numbers, and so much harder to learn later in life. Teachers that have gone through social emotional training are trained in programs written by health and education professionals. They have gone through rigorous testing and years of classroom observations. They have proven results. Read more about Conscious Disciplines 25 years of award winning classroom management here. You could be the best parent in the entire world, but you shouldn’t have to be EVERYTHING your child needs. Trust professionals.

Lastly, there has been an argument against SEL because of the idea that teaching emotional regulation and empathy for others has somehow become 'a vehicle for this quote-unquote 'social justice activism' and the indoctrination of controversial ideas related to race, sexuality and even gender and identity.'

First of all, asking a child if they feel like they belong and teaching them how to react with understanding over anger in an argument is (hopefully) unrelated to any political agenda. We are hoping to help our children learn to communicate better. We are hoping to help offer a strong, assertive foundation based in self-actualization and the knowledge that you can only control yourself, not others. These are teachings based in ancient stoic philosophy. They are not new, and they have withstood the test of time.

Second of all, we at Common Ground firmly stand for our neighbors of every race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexuality, gender identity, etc. If understanding our own feelings and empathizing with the feelings of others is “controversial,” so be it.

Help us create a kinder world. Help us create a world more rooted in reason and focused problem solving.

We can love our parents, our teachers, our friends with all our hearts and still acknowledge that our old methods of teaching and parenting were flawed. We can love ourselves and understand that our CURRENT methods of teaching and parenting are flawed. Let’s continue growing together.

Love Love Love,

LJ and your Common Ground Family