When young children who are in the process of becoming verbal interact with each other, biting often occurs. At SEEC, we choose to look at biting holistically and consider the viewpoints of all the individuals involved. In a manner similar to looking closely at a painting or walking all the way around a sculpture to gain perspective, the educators at SEEC consider the viewpoints of both the bitten child and the biting child, as well as their caregivers. In this way, we are better able to discuss the situation and search for potential solutions.

While it is a perfectly normal behavior, biting brings with it a cloud of complexity because the caregivers of both children often have strong  reactions to the biting.

Parent of the Bitten Child

When a caregiver hears that their child was bitten, their first thought is typically,  “My poor baby!” They are overwhelmed with the natural instinct to protect their child and are worried that they failed to do so. Moreover, biting is seen as terrible offense to most adults. If I was walking down the street and someone bit me, I would be quick to call the police. When adults are confronted by the physical evidence of the bite, their emotions are heightened and they feel naturally protective.

Bitten Child

“OUCH!” is the first thing that goes through a child’s mind as they are bitten. They immediately need comfort from an adult. In my classroom, we would pick up the child or give them a hug. We would also offer a special ice pack to the bitten area. These special ice packs are infrequently and selectively given out and are consequently highly sought after – the ice pack soothes their discomfort and at the same time, gets them excited for a treat, which helps them move past the incident.

After the initial shock, young children begin to process being bitten, which is different from the way an adult would. Children are beginning to learn about their world and how people respond to them. Being bitten is actually a learning opportunity that helps them better understand social interactions. The bitten child may learn that grabbing a toy out of their friend’s hand upsets them or, that climbing on top of another child is potentially scary and painful.  The bitten child begins to understand that his/her actions impact others and when others are hurt or upset, they make act out.

Parent of the Biting Child

Parents of children who are biting may feel confused and wonder why their sweet child would hurt another child. If the child continues to bite, the parents often feel guilty and begin questioning their parenting abilities and even their own child. As an educator, I have worked with caregivers on both sides of the issue and I  notice that the experience is much harder for the caregiver/s of the biting child and work to reassure them that biting, in very young children, is normal and natural. I have found it useful to talk about how the child is biting to communicate their needs. I will often point out that biting can be an immensely effective way to communicate for children who are not yet able to talk efficiently.

Biting Child

For young children who are preverbal or are in the process of becoming verbal, biting is a way to communicate their wants and needs to others. Young children bite for a variety of reasons, some of which may be because they are excited, frustrated, angry, overstimulated, or scared. Children do not bite because they are mean or bad. Biting occurs because young children are trying to navigate the world and they lack both the communication skills and the impulse control to handle situations in grown-up ways.

Educator

In my class, when a child bites, we treat everyone in the situation individually. We immediately comfort and support the child who has been bitten. We explain to the child who bit that biting hurts other people’s bodies. We look closely at the situation and ask ourselves questions about what we as adults can do to prevent future bites. We also talk to the child’s family to get additional perspectives and gain a better understanding of the child’s experiences at home. We then will work together to come up with a plan. Sometimes our plans take longer than we would like, so we have to wait for the children to develop the appropriate communication skills and impulse control, but we keep evaluating, thinking, and working with the children and families.

Newly Verbal: Creating a Responsive Environment:

While yes and no questions are often criticized for shutting down dialogue and limiting possible answers, we have found that there is the potential for these types of questions to do the exact opposite. For the newest speakers, answering yes or no questions gives them the opportunity to say what is on their minds without being limited by their small vocabulary. Children’s ability to understand language, their receptive language, develops before their ability to fully speak. Educators can ask complex questions which the children can comprehend but do not have the ability to answer.

Yet, young children want to be part of the conversation; they want for their voices to be heard and to have the potential to impact the discussion. Asking yes or no questions can give children the ability to enter the conversation. A skilled educator can ask a question that has a definitive answer but respond in such a way that allows for responsive conversation to occur. Take this example from our toddler room:

Educator: “Where are the cockatoos?”

Toddler: Points to a cockatoo

Educator: “Where’s the other cockatoo?”

Toddler: Points to an owl

Educator: “Oh that’s an owl”

Toddler: Points to the owl

Educator: “Owl”

Toddler: Points to a different owl

Educator: “Owl”

Toddler: Points to an owl again

Educator: “Owl”

Educator: “Owl. Hoo Hoo”

Toddler: Smiles and attempts to make “Hoo” sound

While the educator started by asking a closed question, she was flexible when accepting the toddler’s response. After confirming that the child wanted to discuss owls, rather than cockatoos, she responded in a manner that showed that she valued the child’s voice. In the end, both educator and child were able to communicate about the sounds owls make. This conversation began by asking a question with a correct and definitive answer, but rather than limiting the discussion, it actually served as an invitation for the toddler to join and shape the conversation.

Test Knowledge:

Using questions with definitive answers to check knowledge can actually lead to a deeper and more meaningful conversation. At the beginning of the conversation or when new information is introduced it can be helpful to take a pause and ask a yes or no question to make sure that the class is processing the information correctly. This lets the educator know if they need to provide more or less context before moving on. While we believe that the best way to learn is to discover and create meaning, it can be helpful to do a quick and simple check of knowledge by asking yes or no questions.

At SEEC, we try to be careful when doing this check for knowledge. We do not want to make children feel as though they are wrong, incorrect, or that their voice does not matter. So we use specific phrases such as the ones below:

I see why you might think …

“I see why you might think that the whale is a shark, but the blue whale is much larger than a shark. Let’s take a closer look and see.”

That can be confusing …

“The letters b and d can be confusing. They have similar shapes with a long line and a half circle, but they point in different directions.”

Oh that reminds you of …

“Oh, hockey reminds you of soccer? I can see why. Both are team sports, but hockey is played on ice and soccer is played on a field. Let’s see if we can spot other differences together.”

In general, our goal in testing knowledge is not to correct, but rather to explain more or in different ways so that the children have an understanding of the basic principles before moving on.

Excitement:

Young children who are new talkers love saying yes or no. They will emphatically shake their head up and down while saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” or they will stomp their foot on the ground while declaring “No!” Asking yes or no questions with a group of toddlers can be a great way to get the class excited about something.

There can also be a social element to asking yes or no questions that can be particularly powerful for young children who are also developing a growing awareness of their peers. They like watching and copying other children. Educators can harness this by asking yes or no questions to the group and then encouraging the class to become excited about the choice as a group.

While there is certainly good reason for valuing open-ended questions, it is our experience that questions with a definitive answer have a place, especially in the early childhood classroom. Ultimately though, these questions must be responded to in a way that acknowledges the child’s interest and leads to further exploration and thus, understanding.

SEEC will be hosting an educator workshop entitled Fostering Wonder on January 17th.

Please join us to think more about questions and curiosity in the early childhood classroom.

As believers in building a robust community, each year we take time to celebrate our community by hosting a Family Day where we invite families from our Smithsonian Early Explorers Program and our Family Workshop Members. These groups vary from the families who see each other everyday as part of the school at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center. The idea of gathering this group together and celebrating our personal connections is simple, but frequently overlooked in our busy society. We have found that these Family Day events are one of the best ways to create deeper connections among our families and are crucial to the success of our programs.

One of the key components of our Family Day is to highlight the different museums on the National Mall, which we consider to be vital to how we learn. To do this, we organized playful stations that represent the various places that we visited in the hope that they would spark memories and encourage families to discuss their past experiences. For example, we taped bear prints to the ground and added bamboo block to represent the time the class visited the Smithsonian National Zoo and learned about bears. We also put out a toy train set to represent “America on the Move” at National Museum of American History, which is a favorite exhibition.

In addition to carefully curating stations that were meant to spark reflections, we encourage causal discussions by having a calm and relaxed atmosphere. We have child-friendly snacks for families to eat and as families ate their snacks they naturally engaged in conversations. Throughout our Family Day, caregivers were able to build deep connections while discussing their families and their hopes, fears, and excitement about the upcoming year. In order to thrive, families need the opportunity to have these types of discussions with each other.

Raising young children can be challenging and having a supportive community can help ease these stresses. Over the years, the way we think and define community has shifted and changed, and these changes do not always benefit the family. With this in mind, we take the time and effort to create a space where caregivers and families of all types can come together and feel supported by each other.

These family events take time and effort to plan but are well worth it! Community is one of the cornerstones of our programs and we know that communities need to be nurtured in order to grow. Family Day celebrations are one of the many ways that we try to foster a special and unique community and we are so excited that this Family Day was a success. We are already looking forward to future Family Day celebrations!

Every year, SEEC celebrates Teacher Appreciation Week in a myriad of ways. Our kind and thoughtful families bring in special treats including delicious breakfast food, graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate for s’mores, as well as providing food and drink for an after work teacher social.

We also decided to include the whole faculty and community in the celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week. To do this, we pooled our teachers and asked questions about their experiences being a student and about their hopes for the future.  We also asked about the various things that we do for self-care. The answers varied from exercising, to journaling, to collecting and researching moths.

Another way we strove to include all of the SEEC community in Teacher Appreciation Week was by debuting “Teacher Truths”, which are short audio clips where two SEEC faculty casually interview each other and share their knowledge about being an educator and working with young children. So far, we have done “Teacher Truths” with Katie Heimsath and Brooke Shoemaker as well as Meredith Osborne and Silvana Oderisi.

At SEEC, we are always interested in looking for new ways to celebrate our faculty and highlight the importance of early childhood education. It takes a highly skilled educator who is highly empathetic, creative, and willing to get dirty.

For this past week, we have been celebrating the National Association for the Education of the Young Child’s Week of the Young Child. Week of the Young Child was started in 1971 and we are excited to help promote a week celebrating children and their caregivers, including parents and educators. This week also serves to bring attention to some of the unique issues surrounding early childhood and to highlight children’s incredible ability to learn while promoting young children’s need for bonding, love, and emotional support.

Since each day of the week has its own unique theme, we have decided to compile some of the resources that we used throughout this week in the hope that you will find these resources interesting and inspiring.

Music Monday

SEEC believes in the importance of music and movement, which helps to promote language, literacy, motor skills, and more! We even have our own music teacher who visits all of our classes.

Here are some other resources related to music:

• Teacher Feature: Four Year Old Class Explores Music Composition
• Support Math Readiness Through Music
• 10 Ways Babies Learn When We Sing to Them
• There’s New Evidence That Music Lessons Boost Kids’ Cognitive Skills

Tasty Tuesday

Eating may seem like a simple, everyday task, but children are expanding new horizons while consuming meals together. They have to practice navigating new social experiences and also have the opportunity to be introduced to unfamiliar tastes and textures.

Here are some other resources related to eating and preparing food:

• Teacher Feature: Toddler Class Explores Setting the Table
• Teacher Feature: Infant Class Explores Farm to Table
• 10 Things You Can Do Right Now with Your Child in the Grocery Store
• Healthy, Fit Families
• Let’s Eat (Well)!

Work Together Wednesday

At SEEC, we embrace play as a crucial form of learning. We encourage children to interact and work together to develop their social-emotional skills and believe that when young children work together they will develop novel solutions to any problem which may occur.

More resources related to working together:

• Book Club: Free to Learn
• Pondering Play
• Teacher Feature: Preschool Classroom Explores Architecture
• What Is Big Body Play and Why Is It Important?
• Five Essentials to Meaningful Play

Artsy Thursday

Even the youngest of children benefit from the opportunity to create. These enriching, multisensory experiences help them make sense of their world.

More resources related to creating:

• Why Should We Care About the Arts? (or Let’s Create “Both/And” Schools)
• Teacher Feature: Twos Class Explores Alexander Calder
• 5 Things I Learned About Art From Children
• How Process-Focused Art Experiences Support Preschoolers
• Preschoolers as Eco-Artists

Family Friday

We were lucky enough to have Family Friday and SEEC’s Grandparents’ Day fall on the same day. We love having the grandparents visit – almost as much as the grandparents love visiting our SEEC classrooms and going on museum visits with their grandchildren!

More family resources:

• SEEC Weekend Family Workshops
• Family, Love, Traditions – SEEC Quotes
• Culturally Appropriate Positive Guidance with Young Children
• Am I Really My Child’s First Teacher?

This week’s blog is written by Silvana Oderisi. This is Silvana’s seventh year teaching kindergarten and her third year with the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center where she is the reading teacher. Prior to joining SEEC, she spent two years as a Corps Member of Teacher for American in Tulsa, Oklahoma as well as teaching in the District of Columbia. She is passionate about reading, learning languages, and being active. 

Read-alouds are my absolute favorite part of the day in my kindergarten classroom! You can often find me animatedly reading my favorite stories to my captivated students. Beyond simply reading the text, I am actively asking and answering questions to help my students infer meaning from the text. Not only do I love reading aloud to my students, I make sure to intentionally plan each and every lesson to teach the necessary skills my kindergartners need to develop their literacy and comprehension.

It is well known that reading aloud to children is great for developing early literacy skills like print awareness, one to one correspondence, and letter and sound recognition, but did you know that reading aloud to children could be the most important way to build comprehension skills? It helps young children understand what they are reading by allowing them to make connections, infer meaning, and develop higher-order thinking skills. Reading aloud is an important activity to do at home too, as research shows that children’s brain activity increases when parents or caregivers read to them.

At school, a read-aloud is a planned part of reading instruction where a teacher reads aloud to their students. It is an opportunity for a child to witness the ways a confident, expert reader approaches reading a story. It gives children the chance to hear how a fluent reader reads text with expression and excitement while allowing them to think through the various elements of a story. Most importantly, it is through read-alouds that children are able to experience the way reading can take them places through their imagination.

Here are five ways that I make my read-aloud lessons as meaningful as possible for the children in my kindergarten class.

Modeling Thinking Routines

I always remember that when I am reading aloud to children, they are experiencing the many ways a fluent reader approaches text. One thing that I try to do is model my way of thinking, decoding, and making connections to a story. One great way to do this is to use thinking routines when reading aloud.  Some of my favorites are, “This reminds me of the time…” and “Have you ever…?” Although these types of thinking routines may be second nature for fluent readers, this foundational skill helps children make connections to the real world.

Checking for Understanding

I have to make sure that the skills that I am teaching in my read-aloud are understood by all the children in my group. For example, a student might not be able to make inferences to a certain situation because they have no background schema to connect them to the events in the story. When I ask detailed questions, I can begin to pinpoint where the breakdown in understanding is occurring. It also helps me to glean an individual’s comprehension and understanding. Asking comprehension questions while reading aloud also engages children to think critically about the content instead of simply relying on the adult to break down everything for easy understanding. That being said, it is also important to gradually release responsibility to the child by asking questions throughout reading the text that allow them to build on skills and knowledge they have already acquired.

Engagement

Who doesn’t love to see an adult dress up and get silly? This shows that adults are never too old to enjoy a good book and nurtures a lifelong love of reading. It also helps relieve tension for some children who find reading difficult by making it more fun! In my classroom, we love to incorporate dramatic play to encourage children to participate and be involved in reading.

Visuals

Children are more likely to remember the content when some type of visual is presented such as an anchor chart. Anchor charts are a great way to make thinking visible. I record strategies, processes, cues, guidelines, and other content on a chart during the learning process. Whether it is an anchor chart with pictures to help them identify the setting of a story or steps that show the moral of a story, these visuals help them to build comprehension and make further connections to the story that is being read. I also use these visual charts as a reference to help the children think about what is being read to them and formulate their answers to questions about the text.

The Right Book

The single most important part of a read-aloud is making sure that I have chosen the right book! I try to choose books that are not only connected to the skills that we are working on, but that are also engaging and exciting. Whenever possible, I try to connect the book to the interests of my students. For example, my students really enjoy books written by Mo Willems, so I incorporate his books into as many of our units as possible. When we were learning about how to identify the setting of a story, we read Knuffle Bunny which takes place in Brooklyn, New York, a place that some of the students had even visited before!

Stay tuned for my list of the Top 10 Books for Kindergarten Read-Alouds!