"Essential Considerations Before Working in School Age Programs: What You Need to Know!"

Good evening, it's Erica Sakoshio live at the office of our Edith street school age location. Today is January 7th, my sister's birthday. So shout out Happy Birthday to Ms. Kris. I'm doing any internal training today for our school age staff at Family Tree and I wanted to talk a little bit about high quality programming and what that looks like in an after school program. So I have in my hand the national after school standards for high quality programming in a school age program. It's broken up into many components, but tonight I just wanted to talk about my favorite one, which is human relationships. I have duct taped Ms. Sally to the chair, who's not on camera and is here pretty much just because I begged her to stay so I wouldn't be talking to myself. So, so I wanted to talk about human relationships. I think that that, as I said, is the most important part of what we do here at Family Tree.

When we think about human relationships, what do we think about? So there's many components to that larger category. So the first would be for the staff, the way that you relate to the children and youth in positive ways. So you need to think about how do we greet the children? So as each child comes into the program, are you making sure that you're saying good afternoon? Are you making sure that you use their name? A general, you know, statement, hey guys, isn't always enough, especially for a child who's had a bad day. This is the way that we build relationships and you certainly will need those relationships to be really strong. As you're a teacher in the program, all the guiding thoughts that you should think about are the children happy to be with us? And the answer may be no. Some days the answer may be no. Just like as you a teacher, there may be some days that you're less thrilled to be here than others. You don't feel good, you had a bad morning, you have plans tonight, you know, whatever it is. So children may feel that way as well. They maybe didn't have a good day at school. So when you're in tune to how the children feel when they're coming in will give you a sense of where they're at for the day. You also have to think about, do you have enough time to talk to children individually? So when you're out on the playground with the children or at the tables, that's a great time to be able to have some individual conversations with the children. When you're pushing them on the swing or when you're walking around looking at their drawings or whatever activity they may be doing at the table. And it gives you an opportunity to do some of that one on one interaction. And that's another way that you can really build the relationships with the children in a positive way. What else can you do to help the children feel like they're part of the program? That's another thing that you should really think about as a teacher. So those are things that as you walk in the door to keep in mind as you set the tone for the day. Children need to feel welcome in our space and comfortable. And sometimes you have to be aware of your tone and your body language. And is it really as open and as comfortable as you would like it to be?

Children often respond to being accepted and appreciated, as we all do. So I'm sure that you've in the past have used opportunities to have children help you set up an activity or if a child picks up something that you may have dropped, to make sure that you say thank you and find ways for children to be able to participate in the program in that way. But that is another thing that helps children feel appreciated. What do you think, Sally? I know you're off there, but what do you think about that?

I think giving them the opportunity to be a part of the group.

Recognizing their talents, I think would help them a great deal.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And keeping the staff engaged with the children is very important. And these are all ways that we build positive relationships with children. So engagement is like, if you've had the opportunity to watch me cook with children or play blocks with children, I am very engaged. I am doing what they're doing. I'm talking with them not as their teacher, but talking with them. Talk just as another person. I may ask them questions, I may have them ask me questions. So those are ways that you keep children engaged in the program. So number one is, number one we're going to say in this topic is having you help relate to the children in a positive way. And those are four examples of how you can do that. So number two in this series is staff responding appropriately to the individual needs of children. Staff should know that each child have special interests and talents. So let's talk about how do we know? Are we aware of the interests and talents that children have? What would be some of the ways that we could find out? So we talked about doing an interest inventory, which could be formal, which be a questionnaire. You could just talk to children through regular conversations. Ms. Sally, tell me how, how you know what kids like to do, watching.

To what Areas they go to, they may take an interest in block area, they might like music, doing a singing contest. Just watch for cues where they gravitate to.

Sure. Okay. And the other thing too that we had, you know, talked about was expanding that. So if you find that children are always using the same areas, see what you can do as a teacher, what materials you can add or what type of activities that are intentional that you can do with the children to bring it up to that next level.

Secondly, we realize that when you work with the group, you may have children that are a difference of two or three years, like let's say Tiny Timlins. They could be as young as five, as old as seven. So sometimes you have to make the activity that's planned for the day a little more challenging for the seven year old or a little easier for the five year old. Another way you could do that is you can pair children together and you can have the five year old and the seven year old work together and they can come up with somewhere around what you're looking for. As far as an outcome for the learning activity staff can also relate to children's culture and language. You have to think about that as well. We do have some children that do come from different backgrounds. And so when you're picking things like music or dance or language activities, plays, poems, etc. Reach out to the families and find out a little bit more about their culture. That really does help the individuality of the programming. So that is something that a good teacher will do to help children feel confident and valued and welcomed. And to be individuals here at the program should be something that is highly stressed upon.

Let's see. Sally, can you think about ways that you in the past have done activities around children's culture?

Basically just going back to see what their culture actually is. First of all, doing a lot of research.

Expanding upon teacher, paid teacher sites like that, that would help you gear towards diversity. There's a lot of books that will help you with the diversity. A lot of.

Educational books there to help you with diversity. Get to know where their country, where they're from and expand upon that.

Yeah, so individuality, I think is something that is really a big topic right now in our field of education.

There is a lot of talk about gender neutral gender biases. And so it is really important that we make sure that all children feel very welcome and all families feel very welcome. But we want to meet children at the individual place. The other thing that you need to really think about when you talk about individual children is meeting Children where they're at in terms of their temperament and the way that they process things. So some children are very quick to transition, other children are not. It doesn't always necessarily mean that that child is trying to give you a hard time. And new teachers really struggle around that. If I ask them to clean up and they didn't do it right away, or, you know, that child always gives me a hard time. You really have to start to understand how the individual children process information.

Some children with ADHD have a hard time sitting for a long time. So a half hour sitting at a table may be challenging for them. So what is your plan as a teacher? To. To make sure that that child's individual needs are met. So that may look like you have a teacher directed activity at one part of the table and then child led activity directed at the other end of the table. That way the children can move at their own pace. So during a half hour, if one child wants to take the whole half hour and paint on the canvas, they can. And another child may only take five minutes and then want to do the child directed activity at the end of the table. So the individual temperament is really important as well. Do you have anything you want to add to that?

I think basically separating the two. Like you just said, if you have a child who you know is not going to sit down for a period of time, have something else ready for them to go to.

If you have the group who you know is going to sit, then give them something a little more challenging. But remember, you still have that child who might not be able to do that. So just keep giving him something else to do.

Yeah. And it's okay for you as the teacher to sit down with the child and again engage with that child. That sometimes in itself will lend the child to attend to the task longer. So that's it for number two. So number three. Number three. Number three.

Staff encourage children and you to make choices to become more responsible. So when we talk about school age children, especially as we start talking about children in fourth and fifth and sixth grade, they really are striving to be more responsible. They really want to feel like an adult, although we know that they're not. They really are craving that independence and that feeling like they're part of a bigger community.

So some of the ways that staff can do that is they offer assistance in a way that supports children's initiative. So that's why it's so important to have some activities that are initiated by the children. They're in school all day, so the last thing they want to do is come here and hear another three hours of lessons. And I'm the teacher, I'm going to talk and you're going to listen. And that isn't how learning works. So it is important to have that back and forth with students, especially the older ones. It's also okay on a day to say, hey guys, what do you want to do today? Let's. I have nothing planned today. Today we're going to pick what you guys want to do and then we can take a consensus. You know, have kids throw ideas out there, you can write it on a board, we can take a vote and you know, the top three things. With the top votes, those will be the things we'll do for the day. You could also have children lead an activity which we've done many, many, many times. During cooking class, we have a big dry erase board. When we talk about the ingredients, I usually have one of the students go up, write the ingredients, write the directions as we are making the food item, whatever we're making. So that's one way that we initiate. Is there another way you could think of?

No, I think I was just going to expand upon what you were saying, is to give them the opportunity to make the decision, let them be a decision maker for a change instead of us as the teacher saying to them, well, we're going to do this today, let's give them a chance to do it.

I think that is very crucial, especially in terms of child development for children in those older grades. It's very important. And that's why sometimes with the older groups, you sometimes get some kickback. I don't want to do that. And then the teacher's like, oh, they never want to do anything. The fact isn't that they don't want to do anything, it's just they, they really want to be part of that decision making and initiating what it is that they're doing.

And I think it gives them a chance to be a leader. Yeah, it shows them a way of.

Coming into leadership that as well. I think that's a great point. Secondly is staff assist children without taking control and they encourage the children to take on leadership roles, just like Sally said. So again, as many opportunities as you can to let the children initiate and lead activities or have input, the higher quality programming you're going to get. Again, relationships really matter. So if you remember the main topic is relationships. So sometimes there may be a time where you say, johnny, today I know you want to do this, but today we're going to have to do that. And so when you have those strong bonds with the children and that's when that comes into play. But try to make some opportunities to really let the kids kind of take the program and go with it. Our biggest program that ever came out of our center was our ASM dance program that was initiated by children and we just as the teachers just kept adding to the program. We started with one little hip hop class and next thing you know we had a full blown studio for three years. Again, a lot of that was directed by the children, initiated by the children based on their interests and it ended up being a 90 plus kid program. Didn't happen by accident. There was a lot, a lot of leadership from the children in that group, especially the older children.

How often do we let them choose and what are they, you know, what are we going to do with them and with who? So sometimes children have friends in other groups and so this is sometimes an issue because kids want to. I want to go to that group. I want to go to this group because my friend Susie or Johnny. It's important to make sure that we have opportunities where children can be with friends in other groups or siblings even for that matter. Some kids here have older brothers or sisters. Maybe if you talk to the teacher of the other group and say, hey, you know, Brooke really wants to be with Jonathan today. Can we take Jonathan for, you know, a 45 minute rotation or can Jonathan come help run this activity so we can spend some time with his sister? That's okay as long as both teachers know and one point person is accountable for that child. That is totally okay and appropriate. Any thoughts on that?

No, I agree with what you're saying. The younger sibling might feel a little more not powerful, but a little more grown up.

Well, they get excited, right?

They're excited and they want to be with the older kids and I'm going with my older sibling. Yeah, I think that's great.

Yeah. Self give children many choices to choose what they'll do and who they'll do it with. So again, think about that. And I think that that's something that isn't considered as often as it should here. Just being very honest and, and that's something that we probably should take into consideration as we work towards improving the programming and moving up towards a five star level. And the last thing is staff help children make informed and responsible choices. So it's okay to let them make choices, but you got to give them parameters. So you know, maybe if you're in a certain area and you know, the kids just can't be everywhere. You may say, today at tables, our group is going to do painting and canvas. However, we have the comic book section, the free paint section, the building section, all open and available. If you'd like to pick one of those activities within this area, you're able to do that. So when you tell them they can make choices, just make sure that the choices they can actually make. So an example would be if you say, okay kids, you, you know, you could pick what you want to do in this area or you want to, you can pick what you want to do. And then the kid says, well, I want to go play video games on the other side. If you know that that's not an option, make sure you make that clear before you tell kids they have a choice. Because if not, it's kind of like you're reneging on the deal. So be aware of that. Make sure that you have some very specific, you know, choices available. Number four is staff interact with children and youth to help them learn. So the four topics in this area are staff ask questions that encourage children to think for themselves. So when you are doing a lesson, oftentimes teachers have this unfortunate ability to give the kids all of the information without asking open ended questions first or throughout the lesson plan. So if you are saying to the kids who are in the block area, I see building blocks, that's not very open ended, it's not very engaging and it's certainly not going to expand. But what about if you said, what do you think would happen if we added this different kind of block? Or what would happen if we put the smaller blocks on top of the bigger blocks, would it stay, would it not stay? And if no, why? So asking questions, open ended questions. So all the activities that you're doing, even when you're playing football, asking children questions about do you know how the football gets from there to there? So just, it's really important to do that because it helps children learn about the world around them. Especially at the younger ages, children are just becoming familiar with the outside or the school world because they, most of them just left preschool. Many new experiences for them, taking a school bus, not having nap anymore. So there's many changes when they transition from preschool to after school programming. Another part is staff share skills and resources to help children gain information and solve problems. So maybe we have to look things up on Google while we're together as a group. So I can remember we had done this one of the days that we were making pizza and we wanted to find out what was the day that pizza deliveries, what was the, the most, the most delivered pizzas on any given day. And the answer was the day after Thanksgiving. And Halloween was like number two. Super bowl day was like number three. But we googled it because we didn't know the answer. But we, we had a whole bunch of guesses up there. We put them up on the dry erase board and then we googled to see how close we were. So it's okay to do that. It's okay to pull out a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or books from the library to see if you can gather more information. Again, be intentional. If you go back to what we talked about a little bit earlier about children's interests, skills and abilities, those are really the things that you should be tapping into and then taking that information and helping children with learn more about the things that they're interested in. I'm very excited. This month we have Ms. Tammy, who's a teacher here, fairly new teacher, who's a beekeeper. So she offered to bring in pieces of the beehive and talk to the kids a little bit about how she makes honey and the products that you can make from a beehive and a little bit about the bees that she takes care of. So that seems like that will be very interesting and fun. Now that's what I think. I don't know if the kids will think we'll figure that out, but if the kids do, then as spring comes, we'll do more things around that particular topic. And that's kind of how you do it. You see what they really, really like, what they're really engaged in, and then you just keep going with it. And sometimes it grows really big. Who knows, maybe we'll have a family tree bee club. Who knows what will happen? Only the kids can decide that. But the other thing is staff vary the approaches that they use to help children learn. So as we know, not all children learn the same way. Sometimes you have to switch it up how you're presenting a lesson. And when I say lesson, I am talking to you school age folks. You are teaching whether you think you are or not. Every time you do an activity with children, even if it's a fun activity, you have to have a learning goal in mind. You do have to have some type of domain that it's connected to, some sense of purpose of why we're doing it. And it's really important for you to understand what that is. So if it isn't something that you're very versed in, I know, some of you are pretty new, and that's okay. We'll be very happy to help you pick the right trainings to help you understand that a little bit better. The early learning standards really are based for younger children. As we get into, you know, grades four, five, and six, it looks a little different, but we'll be happy to help you with that. Some kinds of questions that you need to think about are, do we ask the children creative questions that will make them think creatively or outside of the box? Now, we just had a staff meeting the other day, and I asked you to put a knot in the string for those of you who are there. It took you a little while to figure that out, and I had to show you because you couldn't get outside of that box. So it's really important that you really get skilled at figuring out how to ask kids things in a creative way. Maybe that will even be part of our strategic planning meeting. Now that I think of it, maybe we even can talk a little bit about that. Sally, tell me how, in your experience in preschool, maybe how you. Or what kinds of questions did you ask children to get them to think more on a cognitive level?

Basically, just expanding upon what the theme was for the week. For example, butterflies. When we were talking about butterflies, just expanding upon their knowledge to a KWL chart. What they know, what they want to learn.

So Sally said, a KWL chart, for those of you who don't know what that is. What is that, Sally?

KWL is what they know about a certain subject, what they want to learn about a certain subject, and then finally, what we learned, what we learned.

Yep.

And that's a KWL chart. And start out like that.

Yeah.

Do a graph. Get the number of students. What color butterflies do you. Make it a whole lesson. What color butterflies do you like? How fast do you think a butterfly can fly?

And that's a great time to Google. Right?

And it's a great time to go expand upon.

Yeah. So it could be any topic. It could be any topic. And again, talk with the kids about what it is that they like to do. But, yes, I do love, you know, those charts. Those charts are fantastic. You talk with the kids, like. And I think we should do it, honestly, before we meet with Tammy. What do kids know about bees? What do they know about honey? What do they know about hives? Then after she teaches them, you know, we're going to give her a list of what kids want to know. And then after she teaches them and does her lesson, we. We're going to be able to go back and say, what did we learn and what did we think? And has our thought changed? What are we going to do now with this information? So I think that that is an excellent point to use that. I know we do use it a lot in the preschool environment, but I think it definitely lends itself in the school age world as well. And then also my last thought about that is also reflecting on what you learned. Reflect. Have the children reflect on what they learned. But you as a teacher should reflect as well. What went good in the lesson, what didn't go well, what would you do differently the next time? That is. That's really important. And that's how you get to the master levels. That's how you get to a place where it comes second nature. You know, some of us have done this a really long time. Some of us are new, and that's okay. We all can still learn from each other. Continue to do your trainings. Go on Better Kids Care. Go on the center for Early Learning Professionals. We have lots of resources right here in the school. This book is here. It's right on the shelf. So we're gonna end part one. We'll just review really quick. Number one in human relationships is staff relate to the children in positive ways. That was number one. Number two, respond appropriately to the individual needs of children and youth. Number three was staff encouraged children and youth to make choices and become more responsible. And number four was staff interact with children and youth to help them learn.