6 Ways to Make Back-to-School Easier For Anxious Students
The transition back to school can be difficult for all students, but if you've ever had an anxious or highly sensitive student in your classroom (and chances are you have), you know just how much more difficult this transition can become.
But how do we know if a student is anxious or highly sensitive? And what can we do to help? Let's start with things to look for:
The key here is to remember that anxiety doesn't always look like fear - it can look like anger, inattention, and avoidance. Another important thing to remember is that anxiety can look different for each child in each setting - at home, their anxiety may show itself as anger and short tempers, but at school it may appear as inattention and avoidance.
So now you know how to identify an anxious child, but how can you help? Here are some easy ideas and things to consider that don't require much work!
When you look around your classroom, how does it make you feel? Are the walls full to the brim? Chances are, if you aren't referring to the things on your walls on a daily basis, they have become "white noise" to your students. For some students, this white noise is no problem, but for our anxious and highly sensitive kids, this can become very overstimulating. If you have an anxious child in your class this year, consider what you could remove from your walls.
Many children that struggle with anxiety are very comforted by a visual schedule. Consider a schedule with pictures or clipart that represent the parts of your day. It's even better when the visual schedule is at the students' level and when the events of the day can be moved or removed when things change (think: velcro dots!).
Procedures are an important part of any classroom, but they are especially important when we have a student with anxiety. Our students that struggle with anxiety are often comforted by the "black and white" and the predictable. If we are unclear with our procedures and expectations, our anxious students become unsure about what they should/shouldn't be doing and this can raise their level anxiety even more. Consider using picture representations for the routines in your day (unpacking, hallway behavior, going through the lunch line, packing up to go home).
Another thing to think about is how you can provide your students with low-risk, fail proof opportunities to practice your procedures. The lunch line is one anxiety-inducing situation that we can help with easily! I created "key pads" for students so they could practice entering their lunch numbers every day before lunch. This is completely fail-proof - they enter it incorrectly? No problem! They just try again. Click the image below to snag my free lunch keypads!
Get - To - Know - You activities can be incredibly stressful for our anxious and highly sensitive students. Often times, there is pressure to speak, to remember other students' names, and to "act silly" in front of a group. If you know you have a child with anxiety, here are some get to know you greetings and activities that are less stressful for the first few weeks of school:
Consider using get-to-know-you activities that are passive. By that I mean activities that are non-verbal or whole group, versus activities that put the spotlight on one student at a time. Click the image above to grab some free activities and greetings to use in your classroom (but note that not all of these greetings are passive!)
Back to school assessments. This is an area where I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning of my teaching career. I had purchased this great assessment packet on TPT (I still think it's a great assessment packet!) and couldn't wait to see where all of my students were and help them to soar to their full potential! Over the first two weeks of the school year, I would give students this packet, read the prompts, and tell them to, "do their best!" I told them I couldn't help them, because I wanted to see what they know already!
The more I think back on this, the more sick it makes me feel. How stressful to have this adult you've just met put this packet in front of you that you have NO IDEA how to complete and say, "do your best!"
I hadn't built relationships with my students yet, I hadn't established trust. How. Stinking. Stressful. Over the next couple of years, I changed my practices and began to assess through play. By watching my kids play over the first couple weeks of school, I learned WAY more about them than I ever could have learned through that assessment packet.
By watching students paint, I can assess their pencil grip. By watching them play a game, I can see strengths and weaknesses in social skills. By watching them play with play-doh, I can see fine-motor needs. By watching them pretend play, I can see who may need services from our school social worker.
These things are so much more important than their letter-sound knowledge and number sense abilities - without the fine motor and social pieces, the other pieces cannot fall into place.
I know that often times, we are required to assess students at the beginning of the school year, but I encourage to advocate for your students and their need to play and build relationships at the beginning of the year.
I've heard it over and over again - "...don't let them see you smile until December". We're told that we need to jump all over any misbehavior right when it happens to nip it in the bud, or else we're setting our classroom management up for failure. I'd argue that this isn't at all how we should be running the first few weeks of school.
If I see a student not meeting an expectation during the first few weeks of school, I ask myself these questions:
Did I teach all the steps this procedure well enough?
Did the student forget the procedure? Do I need to review with the class?
Does this really need to be addressed?
I try to assume that every student in my classroom is doing their best and try to remember that for a 6 or 7 year old, remembering every procedure and expectation in our classroom is hard and takes time.
If it truly does need to be addressed, I make sure to address the student in private. Our sensitive and anxious kids can be completely crushed by being publicly "called out" - no matter how kind the tone of voice.
Speaking of public call-outs, I am also very conscious of public praise of anxious students. A lot of times, our students with anxiety want nothing to do with public attention, even if it is positive. A quiet whisper or secret thumbs up is a great way to encourage our sensitive students.
To truly help our students with anxiety, we need to remember that we have to be their advocates. While anxiety can exist on its own, it is often comorbid with other, more complex issues, like:
...and much more
If you feel like a student in your class is struggling with anxiety, I would encourage you first to reach out to that student's parent to communicate what you're seeing and get their input on what they see at home. In addition to that, though, I would encourage you to refer, refer, refer this student to another qualified professional within your school building.
In my experience as a mom of a child with ADHD and anxiety, it has been a struggle to identify if the anxiety is causing her ADHD, or if the ADHD is causing her anxiety (this changes the way the anxiety needs to be addressed!). I felt like she was having extreme anxiety around letter identification and letter formation, so I reached out to the school Occupational Therapist. Without the OT, we would have never found out that Annie's eyes weren't teaming and tracking correctly - of course that would cause her anxiety! Imagine how you would feel if a letter looked different every time you saw it, or having it be nearly impossible to put your pencil on the right line because the line is moving before your eyes. I would be anxious too!
I was lucky to be a parent with an "in" at the school, but most of our parents don't have that advantage, so it's up to us to be the advocate for the student when we know something isn't quite right. Again, I would encourage you to refer a student to your school counselor, school social worker, OT, SLP - be the adult to help get to the bottom of what is causing this student to be anxious.
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