You have to Maslow before you can Bloom

For many of us, we have never homeschooled before. We had no plans to ever homeschool our children, or teach them at home. We wanted our children in schools with teachers. And let me tell you, your children's teachers are missing them too! Right now, what you are doing is not homeschooling, it is crisis schooling. And it can look different for everyone. 

As an educator, I learned a lot about many different educational theorists during my undergraduate and graduate days in school. This saying speaks to me, especially now! Students must Maslow before they can Bloom." What does this mean? Well, Maslow believed in a hierarchy of needs that had to be met before you could advance to the next one. And he did explain later on that not everyone moves through the hierarchy in the same direction and some may move back and forth through the hierarchy (think of someone who is in the fourth level but then becomes homeless, all of the sudden, food and shelter are going to become much more important to them than esteem and self-actualization.) So what are Maslow's Hierarchy of needs and how does this pertain to our situation with the coronavirus right now? Maslow's Hierarchy of needs start at the bottom and go up starting with 1) Physiological needs-food, shelter, clothing, sleep 2) Safety needs- predictability, feeling safe and secure, having order and control over their life 3) Love and belongingness- friendships, trust, giving and receiving love and acceptance, being part of a group 4) esteem needs-esteem for oneself (mastery, achievement, independence) and desire for acceptance from others (status, prestige) 5)self-actualization needs- realization of a persons potential, self-fulfillment, personal growth https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html 

Right now, many of our  students that may have been at step 5, or even in the Bloom stages (which I will get to next) have gone back to stages 1 and 2. They are having trouble meeting physiological needs. They may be getting 2 meals a day from the schools, but not have enough for everyone. They may be receiving food for just the kids that go to school, but the parents don't have enough to eat. They may overhear their parents talking about how they are going to make rent. They may be worrying about a relative that is sick with coronavirus, or they themselves may be sick with coronavirus. They may also be worrying about safety and security. They doun't have any sense of predictability right now. No one was given a chance to say goodbye to their friends, or teachers. Some were given no guidance on how to complete schoolwork. Parents with multiple kids in the house who may have varying degrees of disabilities are having trouble keeping all of them on tasks and this is creating chaos in the minds of the whole family. Kids of all ages (whether they want you to believe it or not) like a sense of order and control. They may tell you "stop trying to control my life!" when they are in their teen years. I'm sure you have heard that one more than enough. But, when there is no order, and things have no sense of control at all, it can cause a sense of instability that causes children to act out. It causes them to sometimes act what we would consider "younger than their age," even though this is typical behavior. 

What does Bloom have to do with all of this? Blooms taxonomy has stages as well 1) Factual- knowledge of terminology and specific details 2) knowledge of classifications and categories, principally;ilizations and generalizations and knowledge and theories of models and structures. 3) Procedural) Knowledge of subject specific skills and algorithms, subject specific techniques and methods, criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures 4) Metacognitive-strategic knowledge, knowledge about about cognitive tasks including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge, self knowledge. https://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/effective-teaching-practices/revised-blooms-taxonomy/ 

Let me start off by saying, I think our teachers are amazing! What they are doing is a herculean feat! Trying to find work that is going to help our children learn through distance learning, being available for questions during the day, helping them with whatever they need so they can get it right. They are doing amazing jobs that they never wanted to do. They wanted to be in classes with their kids. No one signed up for this. I have to say though, that some kids are back in the 1st and 2nd stage of Maslow while being asked to do things in the 4th and 5th stage of Bloom. And this is darn near impossible. We need to give our teachers some grace, but we also need to give our families a lot of grace! This is not homeschooling! This is trauma schooling! Children may or may not have a complete understanding of what is going on, especially the younger ones and when they do not understand, they sometimes are prone to make ideas up in their head. And sometimes those ideas could be worse than the actual thing that is happening. We need to work on Maslow before we work on Bloom. This is NOT to say that we should just tell the teachers that we aren't doing any schooling at all anymore (though for some families, I will say, this may be appropriate. And this is coming from an educator). But, we need to meet families where they are. With my EI families, some of them just do not want teletherapy. At all. They don't want to chase their kids around with a phone, they'd rather I provide suggestions through weekly or biweekly calls. And that is ok. Some people want teletherapy because it is easier to copy and imitate and learn from the therapist. And thats ok. With teachers, I think it is also ok to meet the children and families where they are at as well. If a family is telling you, "I have 3 kids at 3 different ages and 3 different ability levels that I am trying to help and I am swamped and can not get this done, do you have any ideas?" Sending 3 more emails with more homework is probably not the best plan. Trying to meet them at their level by reducing the amount of homework, or making some of it hands on and having the parent take a video (if that would help the parent because that particular child will not do worksheets) of their work may help. Remember, some kids are feeling the stress of their parents right now, and they are back at Maslow's level 1 or 2. They are also missing their friends. If they don't have a phone at home, or a good wifi connection they may not be seeing their friends right now so they are also not getting the love and belongingness from their friends. They may be getting it from their families, but it is a different kind of belongingness that comes from children friendships. So, trying to find ways to let the kids talk together when you can will help too (Skype, FaceTime, googlemeets, etc). This is a marathon, not a sprint. So we want to be sure to help our kids the best we can. We want to help them go back up that ladder, not slide down it even more. Lets try helping them by also helping their families. Let's meet people where they are instead of trying to push them to where we think they should be. 

Monster Meditations

Sesame Street and HeadSpace have teamed up to create Monster Meditations to help younger kids in this time of chaos. There will be 6 guided mediations released on YouTube, biweekly for kids to follow (and adults to, if you'd like!) The muppets will experience some common emotions and will be guided through mindfulness techniques to help them through these emotions. This is really great for kids who are stressed right now at being out of their routine, anxious from missing their friends and not being in school, sad at not being able to see relatives or friends or go on that special trip they were looking forward too. I would encourage anyone with young kids to check it out. Or even if you have older kids who like Sesame Street, have them check it out too! https://tinyurl.com/Sesame-Street-Mindfulness 

Reading With Kids

I've posted before about the importance of reading to children. This includes babies and young children. But all children benefit form being read too. When babies are young, they benefit from reading the pictures, just talking about the pictures in the book, patting their hand on any sensory pictures so they get the idea of pictures and words having meaning. As they get older, children can sit in your lap or next to you, wherever they are most comfortable, and if you have a hard book, you can let them try to turn the pages, so they learn this important skill of how to hold a book, how the pages turn from left to right, that the words go from left to right and still learning that the words have meaning and connecting pictures to the words.

Reading to children at a young age also turns them in to lifelong readers. Exposing children to books and having them see you reading books and making these happy memories will help make it more likely that they will have a lifelong love for reading.

Reading also increases children expressive and receptive language development. As you are reading to children they are connecting the pictures to the words, especially if you are helping them touch pictures and labeling them at the same time. They may start practicing saying sounds and imitating you as they are hearing you say words while they are listening to you read. So when you are saying "car", after reading a vehicle book many times, you may hear your child start to say "cah" one time. This is what repetition is so important.

Reading is also a great way to bond with your child. You are sitting there with them one on one, showing them pictures in the book, showing them the words on the page and helping them learn about different things. As they get older, you can share more in depth stories with them that have more chapters and more imagination to them, and you are still able to bond with them. Reading to your child before they go to bed can be a great soothing way to end the day with your child.

With that. I have included a video of myself reading Mo Willems "Let's Go for a Drive!" In it, I included some ways to do hand motions with your children, to get them more involved in the story, and to help them stay more attended. You can do this with any story that you read to your child. If you have a story that you feel is too long for your child and they won't attend to it, just read the pictures and perform hand or body motions to it. Any time you get moving with a story, or there is a sensorial aspect to the story, a child is much more likely to pay attention. I hope you enjoy the story!

https://vimeo.com/408190209

IDEA and 504 Accommodations

Have you seen this graphic? I'm sure you have, it's been floating around in many different forms for quite a while. It shows how equity and equality are not the same thing.  Many times in schools we will hear teachers say "I can't give Johnny a fidget because then everyone will want a fidget and I need to treat everyone equally." Or, "I cant let Sally sit on a yoga ball, then everyone will want a yoga ball and I treat everyone equally here." But, equality is not the same as equity. We see in the first image, that by treating everyone equally, only two of the children are able to see the baseball game. In the second image, all 3 are able to see the game by each one being given the support they need. So let's talk about this for a minute.

Let's pretend you have a child in your classroom who is 8 and has ADHD. Your child has a 504 or IEP meeting with you where you start to work on accommodations and modifications to make sure everything is equitable and accessible. As you start the meeting you hear modifications such as having Sally do only odd numbers on the worksheet at home, having her sit next to the teacher, bring in fidgets, sit on a disco sit, draw her answers for reading instead of writing them down. You start to speak up, "wait, but then all of my students will want to do that. How is it fair that she should only do half the work that they do and get to draw in class instead of write her answers down?" Well, Sally has a much shorter attention span than the other students, so when she gets home, it takes her 2-3x the time to do her work that it does her classmates, so reducing the workload, makes this equitable. Sally has a hard time writing out the answers to her reading questions, though she understands the questions and knows what she wants to say, she can't put it to paper. But, she is great at art. So, you are capitalizing on her strength in art, and using that to assess her understanding of the reading. If you were to make her write out her answers, which is more difficult for her, she would get a lower grade, even though she has the understanding, she just does not have the ability, right now, to dictate that understanding. This makes her learning more equitable. You are also letting her have fidgets because her mom has found when Sally has something to do with her hands, she is able to better focus on whoever is speaking. So, she will be able to listen better to what you are saying in class and will remember more of the content.

Many times when you explain to children that you are giving them each what they need to succeed, they will understand. They understand the Johnny speaks in Spanish and that is why the assistant translates things in to Spanish for him. They understand that Susan wears hearing aides and these help her to hear better in the classroom. Or that Bobby is in a wheelchair because his legs do not work in the same way that ours do, so this helps him to be able to get around the class. If you explain that other things like having fidgets can help someone learn, or that drawing helps someone who can't write as well, children will understand a lot more than we give them credit for.

What to do with all these eggs?

Now that Easter is over and you have all these eggs left over, what should you do with them? Depending on your child's age, there are many things you can do with them. If you already have a sensory bin set up, you can add the eggs to your sensory bin to use to scoop items (if you are working with families that have, or you have food insecurity, you can use non-food items in your sensory bin to scoop and pour, or even water), you can hide the eggs in your sensory bin and have your child try to find certain colors of eggs, you can work on open/close, in/out. For younger children you may need to do some hard over hand assistance to help them to work on opening and closing the eggs as you say "open" "close". You can put items in the eggs, but if your child still mouths items, please be watchful so they don't put anything in their mouth. You can count how many of the eggs they find in the sensory bin. If the egg tops come off, you can try putting different colored tops to bottoms, (such as yellow with blue, red with orange, etc) and see if your child can take them off and match them with the correct colors. You can also add them to your child's pretend play and have them use them to feed animals, babies, etc.

If you have older children you can write down things to do or find on pieces of paper and put it in the eggs. Such as "go find something small" "do 10 jumping jacks" "find 5 red things" and so on, and your child would have to do the item that they picked. Older children can also use these to do an egg race, where they put the egg on a spoon and try to balance it while walking. It can be done solo or against a sibling to race and see who does it faster without dropping their egg. You can also hide the eggs in certain places and work on positional words, giving clues like "it's on top of something brown." Or for the younger ones just saying "it's on top of the couch." Or "it's under the table" and having them run to get it, crawl to get it, jump to get it, etc, so they work on identification skills, gross motor skills and receptive language skills at the same time. You can also have children with expressive language delays try to imitate the name of the colored egg after you, or the first part of the word, or any sound.

These are just a few ideas of what to do with all of those eggs. What are some things you have done?

Play is the Work of the Child

Mr. Rogers said it best, "Play is the work of Childhood." As Developmental Therapists, we often come in to a child's home to help with many needs and may hear from some parents, "so, you're going to just play? We play all day." But, there are many different types of play, and children go through stages of play, from cause and effect play (what will happen if I drop this toy off my high chair, what will happen if I press this button?) to functional play (pushing a car back and forth, putting items in and out of containers, and stacking items) to imaginative play (making dolls talk to each other, pretending to feed animals, pretending a fire truck is saving an animal or person), to more evolved symbolic play (playing house, using items for things other than their intended purposes-a block becomes a phone, a circle becomes a cracker, etc, playing dress up and creating characters and align about what they are doing, pretending the child is a fireman and saving people). 

Why is this important and what do  DT's have to do with this? Sometimes children are stuck at a level of play younger than their age level. So a 2 year old may still be at a cause and effect stage, when they should be doing more imaginative play. We can't just go in and make them start playing imaginatively. We need to scaffold these skills. So, we start out showing parents how to first help them play with toys functionally. Not just dumping them out and running away, but taking one out at a time and using it for it's intended purposes, then working to put that away (or, if it's being used with another toy t play, that's fine too). Once we can see that the child has accomplished each stage, we are able to help move on to the next stage of play. And while we are doing this, we are constantly assessing other areas as well. Is the child using their hands appropriately,? Are they able to cross the midline to grab toys? Are they able to navigate their environment to gain a toy? Are they able to pick up small toys with a pincer grasp, a fist grasp or a raking grasp depending on age level? 

All of these are things necessary for the child to grow and develop appropriately and DT's can help in this area. Now, more than ever, children need play. Right now, we are in a time of crisis where we cannot see family members that we may have seen daily or weekly. We are FaceTiming instead of seeing people face too face. Your therapists may be doing phone consults instead of seeing you face to face in order to obey the shelter in place order (depending on your state). Children need play in order to work out their feelings as well. Children use play not only to gain skills but also to work out anxieties. You may see children using dolls to express emotions such as sadness or being scared. You may see children doing more crashing play because that is how they know how to express their anger and anxiety if they don't have words yet. You may also see more meltdowns if your child has sensory issues. And play involving heavy work can help with this as well. 

A good play activity to help Self-Regulation from the book "70 Play Activities," by Lynne Kenney, that you can adapt to different ages is called "walk with me". What you do is call the child to walk with you and as you walk to their pace, add something on the fourth beat like a clap, stomp, or whatever feels appropriate. Then ask if they would like to be the leader (depending on age appropriateness.) They can add anything the like from stomping, to animal sounds, animal walks, etc. You can adapt this to slightly older children having them start off walking like certain animals, add in jumps, skips, and then do 2 steps like one animal, a jump, a step like a different animal. You can adapt this however you like. "This activity moves around the defensive brain to engage the thinker in a connected and collaborative way with a child who may be anxious, nervous or sad."