Calm Parenting Podcast - 13 School Ideas in 13 Minutes for Teachers & Parents

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

For more practical ideas to improve focus, attention, impulse control, and classroom behavior, view our free video at www.CelebrateCalm.com/teachers. Want help or to bring world-class Professional Development to your school? It’s easy. And safe! Email [e-mail] with the name of your school and city. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Calm Parenting Podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off an IXL membership when you sign up today at ixl.com slash kirk. Visit ixl.com slash kirk to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Hey, for our teacher friends out there, it's going to be a tough year, right? A really difficult job just got immeasurably more challenging because of the whole COVID thing, right? Because how are you going to prevent kids who need consistency from falling behind with remote learning, right? And what about kids who have a lot of anxiety? How are you going to get them to stay engaged, not get overwhelmed? How are you going to keep kids on task? What about the meltdowns, the blurting out, all the other disruptive behavior

that's part of a normal classroom, right? In a normal year, now it's all heightened. So let me give you a few tips. And first, I want to say thank you for what you're doing. We have had the honor and pleasure of teaching hundreds of thousands of teachers across the, actually across the world. We did it in Prague. We did it in Ukraine. we did it in a few different places overseas, but we love our in-person training. We can't do it anymore, right? We wish we could, but we're doing it via Zoom conferences. So if you like the ideas that we're talking about in this podcast, go to celebratecalm.com and then that forward slash thing, teachers. There's a free 30-minute video that shows our professional development training, and we're providing it to schools at a fraction of the

normal cost because we want to get this out. We want to help you. We want to help these students. So here are three big categories and probably about eight or nine ideas. I'm going to do it really quickly because that's how I talk. And by the way, if you don't know us, I'm Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm, because someone may have forwarded this to you and you can find us at CelebrateCalm.com. Pretty easy. And if you need help, it's Casey. Email our son Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, at CelebrateCalm.com. We'll be glad to help you. Number one, I encourage you to relax your expectations of yourself and your students. The truth is, it's not going to be a normal school year. You're not going to be able to get done everything that you

normally would. So I encourage you to prioritize, to simplify, to get the core lessons, the core ideas right. And what I'm looking for, my goal is to raise, to foster, to teach curious kids who love to learn. And if at the end of the year, we have curious kids who love to learn, I think we've all done a good job, right? And everybody's already anxious enough. I want you to relax expectations on yourself because you go to bed at night thinking about these kids and you take this seriously and it's your passion. And you're going to be overwhelmed as well. So just do the right things right.

Number two, I encourage you to connect personally with the more challenging kids. That's who we deal with. The kids who have anxiety, who have focuses and tension issues, who have behavior issues in class. And these are kids who often get overwhelmed. And they will fall behind. And these are kids who often get overwhelmed and they will fall behind and they will just stop working. There are very defensive kids because they're usually in trouble a lot at home and in the classroom. So they have this very defensive nature. And anytime they sense negativity, they shut down. So I would encourage you to connect personally with them. And what I

mean is ask them, whether it's through an email, a phone call, a video chat, however you're going to connect with them, ask them first, not about their schoolwork, not about their assignments, because I guarantee you they're going to struggle with them. And they'll immediately get defensive or shut down and say, I don't know. I want you instead, I encourage you to connect with them personally. Ask them about something they care about, something they're curious about. I don't care if it's their pet, their favorite sports team, if they're really into dinosaurs or space or whatever it is that they're into or TikTok videos, ask them about it. Because if you connect with them personally, these kids will work harder for you.

I promise you they are your most challenging students at times, but they're also very bright kids. But I promise if you will connect with them and take an interest in them personally, then they will work hard for you and you'll get a lot out of them. I also encourage you just break things into smaller pieces for them and praise and affirm them often. Not fake praise, you're awesome, but very specific like, hey, nice job on that last project. Hey, good thinking there.

Even if they didn't do it perfectly, start with the positive because the more positive you are, the harder they will work. Number three, and I'll give you a bunch of examples here. I just encourage you to be creative and be flexible so that we create successes. If you watch that free video, we've got 30-minute video at celebratecalm.com forward slash teachers. You will see I go through all of these, a bunch of examples on creating successes in the classroom with, say,

impulse control, meltdowns, blurting out, kids not listening. So a big part of what we teach is instead of just going to consequences, hey, if you don't do this, here's your consequence. See, that doesn't work for most of the strong will kids. And you've noticed that they don't care about consequences. So what I do is I notice, I know that this student struggles in a certain area. I know that already. So why don't I proactively create successes, give that child tools to succeed? Because once they start succeeding, that breeds more success and confidence. And then they work harder and they push through the hard things. So first example, reading. I just encourage you. I don't care what they read about. I don't really care at the moment

if they're reading on grade level. I just want these kids reading something, anything that they're curious about. Because if you get them reading, they'll start to understand the joy that does come from reading. And I'd rather have them read willingly about something they just are really curious about than forcing them, right, just to read it just to get through because they don't really learn that way. I'd encourage you, you know, audiobooks. There is some research that shows if kids listen to audiobooks, it does create the same neural pathways in the brain that reading does. So it's not my favorite, but if it creates a

success and they're listening to an audiobook, now if they can listen to an audiobook while they're reading along, that's even better. But if you have a child who's just shut down, I'd encourage you get that success and say, when you listen to that audio book, tell me about the story. What'd you like about it? Let's get them into it. Listening to podcasts is a great way to learn.

My son and I, son's grown now, but he struggled with learning and reading when he was a kid. And now he reads. He's a voracious reader of very scientific books really difficult stuff including he reads russian literature for some reason and loves it and it is not easy but listening to podcasts we learn a lot through podcasts too let's go through math right in, for many of the kids we work with, the home store. And that way they have to calculate maybe percentages of a sale. You can give them like, well, what if you had a 50% coupon off that lovely chair? What would it cost then? It makes it more concrete for your older kids. It could be like, hey, you've got this many Instagram followers, but this person has this many.

You can teach algebra. What percentage increase in your followers by doing something really ridiculous? I'm kidding. But what percentage of followers do you need in order to catch up to that famous person, that other person who has this many followers, right? So you can use things that they're accustomed to and that they like. And once they get the concept, it's much easier to look at the page on the book and do the actual problems. Three, writing. Writing's really hard. I have a whole thing in our professional development training. I'm not sure if it's on the free video clip, the 30-minute video clip at our website,

celebratecalm.com slash teachers. But in our Zoom professional development training, we go through this in great detail, but it's a podcast. So I'm going to keep it short. I'd encourage you, let your kids write what they're curious about. I don't care. I just want them learning how to write, how to express their thoughts, and how to get it into a persuasive writing, whatever you're working on to an introduction, three support points, and a conclusion. I don't care what you write about. I encourage you, this is a weird thing, encourage them to do their first draft and have it be very, very messy. Even tell them, I don't care, you're older kids, I don't care if it's a bad first draft. I want the first draft to be messy and it can be bad. I don't care. And

here's why. Because the hardest part of writing for many of these kids is getting thoughts out from head to paper. They have all kinds of creative ideas, but as soon as they sit down and try to write, by the way, chewing gum while writing, listening to music while writing can often be very, very effective. So I just want to, the words we use when we taught these kids at our house was, I want you to vomit the thoughts from your head onto paper. Why? Because little kids, especially boys, love anything that's disgusting. And when they got into school, they would remember, oh, that's right. I'm supposed to vomit my thoughts out of my head onto paper. It doesn't matter if it's neat or not. I just want them written down so that they're concrete. Because now with computers, you can take all

those different ideas and cut and paste and move them around. And so that's what I want. And I'd encourage you to give them some extra time to write. I have written probably in my professional life, I've written millions of words. I write a lot. It takes me a long time. And so I encourage you, maybe allow them to get the first draft one day, but then let it soak in overnight. Let them think about it. And the next day when they're fresh, they put it all together. I encourage you to be flexible with that. Some kids, you know, if you want to allow them occasionally to do a PowerPoint presentation, they still have to use images and words to express their ideas. It might be a thing to mix in. And then the last thing I'd encourage you to do, hands-on project-based learning around using their particular gifts, talents, and passions, right? So if you have a unit on,

you're doing it on ancient Rome, maybe once in a while, instead of doing a written assignment, you know that one of your kids is really good with building with Legos or has an engineering brain, you could say, hey, what I want you to get out of this, one of the things I want you to get out of this unit is the great engineering feats of the ancient Romans. So I'm going to challenge you. Could you build an ancient Roman Colosseum or the Parthenon or an aqueduct? And could you build that and send a picture of it for me? Or if you have regular classroom, bring it into class and show the rest of the class. They're still, they're getting the core concept, but you're letting them do something that they're good at doing, which builds confidence. You know, if they want to do a TikTok video, I know, but if they want to do a

TikTok video and they do it really well, and it demonstrates that they understood your lesson plan, I'd be okay with that, right? And so I encourage you with this. Relax your expectations. I want you to enjoy this school year. You got into teaching because you have a passion for teaching kids and you're a curious person and you want to develop them as human beings. So step back, figure out what's important to you this year to have curious kids who love to learn. Connect personally with them and then create successes. And you'll find with these kids, as you do those things, they'll work harder for you

and they won't have as many behavior issues. I encourage you, reach out to us. My son's name is Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, at CelebrateCalm.com. And if you go to that teacher's page at our website, you'll see we have the free video. All of our information is there. We go through what we cover, all the behavior issues, learning issues, and a lot of creative good stuff. And it's fun, too. Our training is really fun.

If you're a parent listening to us, reach out to us and we'll put together a proposal for your school. It's very, very easy now with our online training. Or if you're doing in-person professional development, we'll come. I'll put a big mask on. I'll put a helmet on. I don't care. I just want to help you out. I want you to enjoy this school year and enjoy these kids. So if we can help you, let us know. Love you all and thank you for doing what you do. Bye-bye.