What was your experience as a child during holidays? Do you find them stressful now? How do we help students prepare for extended holiday breaks?

The holidays can bring stress and disruption to daily routines. These times can result in an escalation of stress and misbehaviors in the classroom. Maintaining structure and routines during this time helps create predictability. Predictability helps create and maintain a felt sense of safety. Visual routine books and pre-holiday rituals built on a healthy family model help support children in managing the stress of holiday breaks.

In this episode, we will learn strategies for reaching and building relationships with children and their families transforming both the home life and the life of the classroom. Listen in as long time Kindergarten teacher and two-time Teacher of the Year Tiffany Taylor shares how to ease the pain of difficult good-byes on Friday afternoons and challenging hellos on Monday mornings.

Essential Takeaways

• Maintaining classroom routines pre-holiday breaks maintains a felt sense of safety in the class family.

• Utilizing a healthy family model to create structure and rituals within the class family eases the stress of holiday breaks.

Steps for Tomorrow

• Make a routine book for things that will be out of routine before the break. Create the book together with the students and read it often in the weeks before the break.

• Be aware of your own emotional state and what you are bringing to the classroom

• Do something that builds classroom family that replicates your own home family

• Have open conversations about feelings that arrive during the time leading up to holiday breaks

Important Links

Conscious Discipline website

Products

• Conscious Discipline: Building Resilient Classrooms

• Feeling Buddy Toolkit for Classroom

Show Outline

:22 What is Conscious Discipline

1:20 Introduction of topic and stressors associated with preparing for the holidays

3:43 The executive skill of flexibility and what happens when it goes “off line”

6:40 Introduction of guest teacher Jill Beck

10:38 Creating a School Family with 5th grade students

13:36 Student behaviors approaching holidays and how to help

15:49 Creating a countdown to holiday break routine book

18:27 Pre-holiday break rituals

20:14 Talking with students about worries and excitements as holidays approach

20:53 Easing the stress of testing before holidays

23:19 Playing “Rob your neighbor”

24:53 Returning to the school family after long holiday breaks

26:57 Steps for tomorrow

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

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On behalf of our Conscious Discipline family, we wish you well.

ConsciousDiscipline.com