Recently, at a staff meeting at our school, we had a wonderful presentation about the effect of trauma on learning and the way the brain reacts in times of stress for children who have experienced trauma in their young lives. It had been a particularly hard day at school, and it was just the first week in December.

Many of our more behaviorally challenged students had seemed to have picked this specific day to act up, act out, or cry out for help. Every year at the beginning of the holiday season we seem to experience this “canaries in the cage” response to family stress. Like the coal miners who used to carry canaries in cages into the mines as early warning systems for oxygen deprivation, we have our children who give us their own early-warning signals that there may be more “security deprivation” afoot in the school environment then we imagined and that a lot may be going on at home and in the community. In our town, this includes real worries about rent, fuel assistance, food and clothing, and who will be with whom during the holidays.

One of our teachers noted that what we can do and do well is to provide clear structures and routines in our classrooms that we have set in place during the first six weeks of school. This reminded me about how important it is to redouble our attention to these routines in the weeks leading up to the holiday break and in the first week back to school in January. This can be done in simple but elegant ways. Here are a few possibilities you might want to try:

• Have a different student read the daily schedule to the class during Morning Meeting

• Have children write the daily schedule in their journals each morning when they come in

• Keep the line-up structure the same for a week (birthday order, random number pick and then line up by number, states of the USA, random pick, line up alphabetically by state, etc.)

• Assign seats in the cafeteria during this period of time and give children conversation topics on certain days. Call this “New Friends Week.” The children may complain about this change, but we see so many social difficulties arising during this time in the lunch room and on the playground that we have instituted this policy, just for the weeks before the holidays. We tell the kids we want them to be able to get back to seating by choice, but we will go back to assigned seats when we see many having difficulty. (I got a petition from students last week “demanding” a vote on assigned seats, telling me they were paying attention.)

Post to the blog your strategies around the holidays! Or send an email with questions to yardsticksblog@gmail.com