48 FREE SPIRIT PUBLISHING PARENT RESOURCES 48 When You're the New Teacher 28 Strategies to Align Your Good Intentions with Your Teaching Practices Grades Pre·K–12 Pub Date: October 2024 Paperback 160 pages Trim Size: 8.5 in. x 11 in. 9798885545099 by Elizabeth Soslau Help Anxious Kids in a Stressful World 25 Classroom Strategies Grades K–8 Pub Date: November 2023 Paperback 264 pages Trim Size: 8.5 in. x 11 in. 9798885543262 by David Campos and Kathleen McConnell 1 INTRODUCTION Anxiety in Children Is Real and Widespread You likely selected this book because something about your students is concerning you. Perhaps your students seem uneasy, worried, or nervous. These anxiety-related symptoms are on the rise, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic began. There is a good chance that students are not performing like previous cohorts because they are experiencing anxiety like never before. To complicate matters, they might not have an anxiety diagnosis nor receive services but they still need your help. To help you help your students, in this book we discuss childhood anxiety, why it is increasing, and what you can do to offer support, guidance, and strategies to prevent and moderate anxiety’s effects on students. We are strongly committed to ensuring that teachers, regardless of their prior knowledge and backgrounds, have a wide range of easy-to-understand, practical, useful instructional tools for working with anxious students. Whether you are a new or experienced teacher, whether you’re in general or special education, this book is for you. You can learn about the charac- teristics of anxiety, its physiological origins, and the domains of student learning it impacts. Most importantly, you will learn what to do and how to do it. The strategies in this book are supported by research, easy to implement, and designed specifically for teachers. We know that if you use them, they will help your students with anxiety. Why We Wrote This Book We are former classroom teachers—in both general and special education—with more than sixty combined years of experience working with children who have special needs, as well as with their teachers and school leadership teams to improve lesson design and delivery, learning environments, and collaboration. Our classroom experiences taught us that many children, especially those identified with disabilities, are on the social margins at school, and that position often leads to loneliness. When we explored this topic more deeply, our research confirmed that childhood loneliness is far more common than we originally guessed. To address this issue, we wrote a book on childhood loneliness titled Lonely Kids in a Connected World: What Teachers Can Do (2021). As we designed our intervention strategies for Lonely Kids in a Connected World, we combed through hundreds of scientific articles, which showed that many aspects of loneliness are intertwined with childhood anxiety. (You’ll find a comprehensive definition of childhood anxiety in chapter 1, but for now you can think of anxiety as an uncomfortable feeling Equip teachers with the knowledge and tools needed to address child and adolescent anxiety at a critical moment. · Provides a framework for understanding anxiety, its causes, and the various ways it can present in young people · Offers standalone action strategies for classroom use, including a matrix to identify which strategies may be most useful for specific situations · Makes implementation of strategies easy with reproducibles for teacher and student use 9 1 Getting Your House in Order Strategies for School Year Preparation T his chapter is designed to prepare you to enter your classroom with concrete ideas to set your students and yourself on a pathway to success. Through questionnaires, letter writing, activities, and discussion, you will gain informa- tion about the skills and wisdom your students bring with them to your classroom and plan ways to integrate these skills into the curriculum. You will also request, analyze, and reflect on input from your students’ parents or guardians about their expecta- tions and help students develop plans for achieving goals aligned with their families’ expectations. At the conclusion of this chapter, you will be able to answer the following questions: • What are my students’ funds of knowledge—unique lived experiences and skills—and how can I connect these skills to the curriculum that I need to teach? • What community assets are available to enhance my instruction and support my students and their families? • What expectations do my students’ families hold? • How can I help my students prepare to meet their own and their families’ expectations? Whether they’re a teacher candidate, a first-year teacher, or a veteran, all educators need to prepare for the school year by getting to know the community they will serve. The activities in this chapter will help you learn about your students, their families, and the community assets and educational resources that are available to you. You can use this information in your teaching to create contexts for learning that relate to your students’ lived experiences—to build connections between students’ prior knowledge and the new curricular content you’re responsible for teaching. You can use students’ Self-directed, self-paced professional learning teachers can use to build agency and improve their practice. · Provides student teachers and new teachers with a clear set of actions to move into their position and teach well right from the start · Offers practical, step-by-step guidance for building relationships with colleagues and administrators, affirming students' identities, navigating challenges with other professionals, and putting love and care at the heart of teaching · Helps educators build a foundation and philosophy for teaching and collaborating and includes stories from educators and sample dialogues
