A Guest Post by Laura Minnigerode Let’s start with this fact: An aggressive child is struggling with fear. What can that look like in a preschool classroom? There are almost as many answers as children, but here are some behaviors I have seen in my classroom: Biting Grabbing Hitting Pushing Scratching Pinching Verbal attention seeking
With Laura Minnigerode You thought you’d covered everything. It’s late in the day, your baby is fed, healthy, and their diaper is changed, you’ve jiggled and jostled them until you are exhausted, and they are still crying. Or… You managed to get them to settle only to be woken at 2 am by their
A guest post by Laura Minnigerode Children’s brains are wired to connect with caregivers. And if they cry it means they feel especially safe and secure. Since a child’s limbic system works brilliantly to protect them, they will often find a pretext to offload stress, whether that’s a small bump which causes a big
By Laura Minnigerode Carmela is 21 months old, and a student in my classroom in a community college lab school. Because she loves to play and is not as sleepy as many of the other children she usually struggles at nap-time. Often, the teachers in the classroom will tell substitutes and student teachers, “Carmela doesn’t sleep
As Kirsten Nottleson faced the room of 30 female prison inmates, she could barely think. “We’d been told that these women were coming to the end of their sentences, that they would soon be reunified, and we’d prepared some pretty emotional stuff,” she says. But as she and her co-worker walked through the prison that