COUNSELOR'S CORNER

My name is Cesira Rivadeneira. I was born in Lima, Peru, where I graduated as a Clinical Psychologist from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I completed my internship in a home of adolescent mothers where I understood the need of having good social and emotional health. There I also learned how understanding our emotions is the most important lesson we,, as educators and parents, can teach our kids.

I am married and have three daughters. Antonia and Camila attend SWS, and Bianca is studying Music Education in TCU. As a parent, I truly understand the importance of a complete Spanish immersion program, and as such I joined SWS as the School Counselor in 2017. My primary goal is to strengthen the school’s Core Values through strong social emotional learning at all three campuses, training our teachers and teaching our students how to understand their emotions and be able to handle anxiety, anger control, friendship disagreements, bullying, academic challenges, and more. I hope the information and resources shared below prove helpful to you and to your family. You can always reach me at cesira@spanishworldschool.com.

The first weeks of school form the moment students need to understand what is expected from them and what rules and procedures they need to follow so they can have a smooth school year. These first few weeks can also bring kids some anxiety and fears until they learn routines and can predict what is coming next.
One strategy to help cope with this anxiety is the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique, which can be used with children and young adults. For each part of this activity, kids can say what they see, feel, hear, smell, or taste.

5 – SEE: Have your kids look around for and state 5 things they can see.

4 – FEEL: Ask them to list 4 things they can feel.

3 – HEAR: Ask them to listen and name 3 sounds they can hear.

2 – SMELL: Ask them to identify 2 things they can smell.

1 – TASTE: Ask your kids to state 1 thing they can taste or want to taste.

0 – Finish by taking a deep breath and asking your kids how they feel.

One way to help our Jaguares handle new adventures, ongoing patterns, and possible changes is to work together and focus on Social & Emotional Learning (SEL video). At school, this encompasses five skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Each week at Grand we work together, pairing our lesson with a book or fun activity so your Jaguares can share with you what we talked about that week. Some of our activities and strategies include exploring the Counselor’s Toolbox, where we find objects that explain a counselor’s work; Meet the Counselor bingo to help students learn about and connect with their school counselor.

Young learners appreciate the opportunity to talk and learn about the differences among emotions, feelings, and sensations. While going through our emotional library and learning different emotions’ names, students learn to understand how our emotions trigger different sensations or feeling in our body. Through a combination of story and simple experiential activities, the book Listening to my Body guides children through the process of noticing and naming emotions and corresponding physical sensations and feelings; this will help students build on their capacity to engage mindfully, self-regulate, and develop a deeper sense of well-being. Listen to this read aloud with your Jaguares to practice awareness of how our bodies feel and imagine how they might feel with different emotions.

People generally use the words “feeling” and “emotion” interchangeably, but there are distinct differences between them.

• Emotions: “The feeling of an emotion is a distinct process of having that emotion in the first place, so in order to understand a feeling, we need to understand what an emotion is.”
• Feelings: “Feelings are mental experiences of body states, which arise as the brain interprets emotions.” – Antonio Damasio, Neuroscientist

Share this poster of different emotions with your Jaguares to share how emotions look and feel. Another helpful resource is a book by Diane Alber called A Little SPOT of Feelings about a little Scribble SPOT who is an Emotion Detective. He will teach your children all about different emotions and facial expressions, showing specific examples of children describing how they are feeling. Listen to this read aloud and practice with your Jaguares how to name feelings for each emotion. Students PK-2 can explore how each emotion looks and feels on the heart, stomach, hands, feet, and head, while older students can reflect on how each emotion provokes different feelings in our body, like nausea, chills, rapid heartbeat, and much more.

Another important element of self-awareness is self-esteem. At SWS we work with students towards building confidence, as kids with positive self-esteem feel confident and capable. They value themselves and their abilities, feel proud of the things they can do, and try their best. Kids develop positive self-esteem by working hard toward a goal and seeing their hard work pay off repeatedly. Accomplishing things shows them they have what it takes to face new challenges. Their success makes them feel good about themselves, and they learn that it’s even OK to fail (understood.org). Books like I Like Myself by Karen Beaumont encourage kids to appreciate everything about themselves–inside and out. Messy hair? Beaver breath? So, what? The main character in I Like Myself knows what really matters: loving the way she is. Another resource to inspire conversations about self-esteem and self-value is a video called “Boundin” which teaches kids that whenever they fall, they can get back up and always believe in themselves! Talk with your Jaguares about what makes them special and what they love about being themselves!

Students with strong self-awareness and self-esteem are comfortable making mistakes. Letting children learn from their mistakes helps them build resilience and is essential to raising a confident, capable, happy, and successful adult. When children have the opportunity to struggle and sometimes fail, they develop important social and emotional skills. Of course, families shouldn’t risk their safety or not respond when what is needed most is reassurance and love. However, our role as adults should be to support and guide, rather than do for them what they need to learn to do for themselves. By supporting kids when they make a misstep, parents reinforce these benefits and watch them learn valuable lessons:

• Making mistakes increases self-reliance.
• Making mistakes builds confidence.
• Making mistakes creates a healthy outlook with less anxiety.
• Making mistakes creates the ability to accept consequences.
• Making mistakes increases resiliency.
• Making mistakes lets kids learn to handle stress and disappointment.
• Bonus: Making mistakes allows parents to practice their own coping skills!

Our ability to self-regulate our emotions in difficult situations greatly influences how effectively we can solve the problems we face. In fact, emotional regulation is frequently the determining factor in whether and to what extent the problem is solved. For example, when a problem occurs, most of us can quickly figure out the size of the problem and then regulate our emotional reaction to stay calm and deal with it. But that’s not always the case. New or even bigger problems are created when the size of our reaction is mismatched to the size of the actual problem. We also want students to learn that we all have feelings, and our feelings are okay. “Feelings” are what we feel regardless of whether we have language to describe them. On the other hand, “emotions” are words we use to label how we feel so we can create a better cognitive awareness and begin to learn the process of emotional self-control (www.socialthinking.com). Our Jaguares have learned that different situations from our daily lives can be categorized them by gravity:

• Small Problems: Can be solved by students themselves or just ignored
• Medium Problems: Need help from an adult to figure out what to do or how to understand their emotions
• Big Problems: Follow the instructions of an adult to keep safe

Here are some examples shared by our SWS students:

Helping our kids to understand the size of their problems is the first step in being able to manage emotions and begin problem solving. Problem solving is a challenge they will face throughout their childhood and long after becoming adults. If they understand that our challenges can be small, medium, or big, they will be able to face any misstep and move on, thinking of the best solution. Please keep helping your Jaguares identify the severity of their problems and work with them to choose an appropriate reaction. This video, The Size of the Problem, can help your Jaguares talk about self-regulation with you at home.

Another important element of self-regulation is coping skills. Coping is not something we are born knowing how to do! It’s something we learn how to do with practice. It’s never too early or too late to start developing healthy coping skills, and teaching your kids healthy coping strategies will help them become more resilient when handling life’s ups and downs. Coping skills are strategies we use to manage feelings and handle stress (www.strong4life.com). Just like we need to help kids learn to identify and express feelings, we need to teach them how to manage and cope with those feelings. Coping also refers to what a person does to avoid, remove, lessen, or “get through” a stressful situation. The coping process uses personal resources to manage routines, frustrations, and challenges, helping the person maintain or enhance feelings of well-being. Here is a helpful book to read with your Jaguares: I Can Handle It by Laurie Wright. In this story, Sebastian talks about different emotions he is experiencing. By telling himself “I can handle it,” he shows the reader different self-regulation strategies and coping skills to feel better.

Coping skills helps students build resilience. We know that resilience creates happier, less stressed children wherever they are, whether at home, school, extended care, school programs, extra-curriculars, family events, and more. Resilience refers to a person’s ability to cope with the ups and downs of life. For children it also means how they deal with the challenges they might face while growing up. This could mean dealing with events like a death in the family, moving to a new school, or starring in a school holiday program. Here is a video that explains a helpful activity for helping children learn about and apply resilience: We used an inflatable wobble punching bag and talked about how, no matter how hard things that have happened to us may feel (here we push the punching bag), we need to get back up.

Self-control, which plays out in different ways, often depends on kids’ situation and setting. In class, for example, students with age-appropriate self-control wait to be called on instead of blurting out answers. They take time to think about what the teacher has said. At home, kids do not interrupt conversations even when they’re anxious to say something; they wait until the other person has finished talking. (www.undestood.org). Here are some resources SWS Grand students love:

• In K-1, we read The Wolf that Learned Self-Control by Orianne Lallemand and Eleonore Thuillier. When Wolf’s moods begin to change without warning, his friends begin to worry. Wolf sets out to tame his ever-changing emotions, a feat more easily said than done. How can Wolf manage his moods?
• In grades 2-3, we watched a video Cookie Monster Practices Self-Regulation from NPR. Here Cookie Monster needs to stop and think eating all the cookies. Waiting is very hard for him, so he needs to practice self-regulation and self-control by using different strategies.
• With grades 4-5, we watched the video Why Do We Lose Control of Our Emotions? which introduced a new expression, “flip our lids.” This is when our rational brains have a poor connection with our emotional brains. Our feelings are intense, and we’re not able to access the logical, problem-solving part of our brain. This a way for older kids to understand why it is so hard to manage our emotions when we have strong feelings.
• For parents, we understand that parents appreciate support to understand and cope with some of the possible behaviors seen in our Jaguares. Here are some great resources for our current times and beyond:
  • Is My Child OK? Warning Signs Kids and Teens are Stressed About COVID-19
  • What to Do (and Not Do) When Children Are Anxious

While anxiety, stress, and even learning disorders such as ADHD can affect the entire body, they most notably affect the hands and fingers. Heightened anxiety in a child can result in restlessness, shaking, and even cramping in the hands and fingers. Although fidgets cannot prevent or eliminate these issues, they can calm a child (or adult!), since fidgeting is a calming mechanism, keeping hands busy. At SWS Grand, each classroom is equipped with a set of fidgets for students or teachers needing support. For individual students, fidgets from home may be approved on an individual basis with an implementation plan provided by a licensed counselor, therapist, or other medical professional. If you feel your Jaguar needs a fidget, please reach out directly to their classroom teacher so we can evaluate this need and plan accordingly.

Fidgets have been successfully introduced into SWS Grand classrooms by our teachers, within some basic parameters. The teachers have explained that, like eyeglasses, fidgets are a learning tool that some students may need to function and focus better in the classroom. Each classroom has norms and expectations for all students around fidgets:

• Fidget tools are to be used during listening activities and may only be used to help you focus and attend better, or to help your body feel calmer.
• Fidget tools are to be held in your hands and not tossed in the air, dropped, juggled, thrown, or bounced.
• Fidget tools are for you only and should not distract or interfere with your or other students’ learning.
• When fidgets are not in use, they need to be kept out of sight or in a designated space where they belong.
• Fidgets may not be taken outside to recess or to Specials classes.

If these expectations are not observed, teachers will temporarily take away a fidget until the user can demonstrate their understanding of classroom expectations.

Social awareness is the ability to take and apply the perspectives of others into our interactions with them. As your child grows, they become more aware of differences by watching, listening, and forming friendships. They learn about joining with others to form groups and, in doing so, learn how they are like them and how they are unique. Each relationship adds to an internal catalogue that children use to form their view of the world (scholastic.com). Only You Can Be You by Nathan and Sally Clarkson talks about how some kids like to dance and laugh out loud, and some sit quietly and make up stories in their heads — and everything in between. We’re all different and that’s okay! Here is a brief video to better understand what social awareness is and why is it so important. Please continue talking to your Jaguares about differences and acceptance.

Students developing social awareness learn to read social cues, which are forms of subtle communication that help kids “read” other people and react appropriately. Social cues include facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and personal space or boundaries. Using the example of a traffic light, students easily explain why we need contextual alerts. Just as traffic lights signal safety measures, other people give us signals, too, so we can understand their feelings and intentions–we just need to pay attention! Learning these different signals will allow us to effectively communicate with other people with more empathy and kindness. Here is a book that you can read with your Jaguares called Clark the Shark by Bruce Hale. Clark loves life! Maybe he loves it a little too enthusiastically though. His teacher, Mrs. Inkydink, helps him figure out how to control himself and understand his friends’ social cues.

Social awareness helps students build kindness. Patty O’Grady, an educational expert in neuroscience, emotional learning, and positive psychology, reports that “kindness changes the brain by the experience of kindness. Children and adolescents do not learn kindness by only thinking about it and talking about it. Kindness is best learned by feeling it so that they can reproduce it” (Edutopia.org).

For young children, kindness goes hand in hand with respect. Teaching children respect includes helping them communicate in a way that is effective, encouraging them to take responsibility for their own mistakes, and coaching them to better tolerate the mistakes of others. We also teach children that respect includes the ability to recognize and appreciate the rights, beliefs, practices, and differences of other people. Often, people use the words “tolerance” and “acceptance” when they talk about respect. These are important, but respect means more than just tolerating or accepting others. Mutual respect means:

• You feel safe being around each other.
• You know it’s ok for both of you to express who you are.
• When you disagree, you listen to each other and show patience.
• You don’t yell or talk over each other.
• Neither of you control the other person’s choices.
• You both talk openly about your needs and wants.
• You both allow the other person space if they need it.
• You can both admit when you’ve made a mistake.

SWS students understand that being respected by important people in our lives growing up teaches us how to be respectful toward others. Respect means that you accept somebody for who they are, even when they’re different from you or you don’t agree with them. Respect in our relationships builds feelings of trust, safety, and wellbeing. Respect doesn’t have to come naturally – it is something you learn (kidshelpline.com.au). This video provides a great foundation for families to talk about respect. At SWS, we work to help our Jaguares understand how respect looks, sounds, and feels.