No Put Downs

We teach and utilize a set of Lifelong Guidelines and Lifeskills developed by Kovalik and Associates to set positive behavioral expectations in the classroom.  One of the Lifelong Guidelines is "No Put Downs."  We encourage the children to use only nice words or words that make someone feel good.  We call these "Put Ups."

We read the book, "Chrysanthemum" by Kevin Henkes.  He is the author we are going to focus on during September.  In the book, Chrysanthemum goes to school for the first time.  During the first few days, some of the girls in the class make fun of Chrysanthemum's name since it is much longer than theirs.  They tell her she is named after a flower.  All is well after Mrs. Tinkle, the music teacher steps in and says she loves the name Chrysanthemum and plans to give her new baby the name.

While listening to this story, the children began to feel how Chrysanthemum felt.  They realized they do not like put downs.  We discussed many put ups that we could give to our classmates.

Next, each child received a heart made of paper.  We shouted put downs to the heart as we crumbled it and stomped on it.  We then attempted to smooth the heart out and found that we couldn't.  We ripped the heart to symbolize a broken heart.  We found that even when we said "Sorry," we couldn't fix the heart.  Hopefully, the children saw that put downs can hurt and even if you say, "Sorry,"  the hurt can remain behind.  However, the children were also told that they didn't have to listen to anyone else tell them who they are.  This is a more difficult lesson and will take some time to learn.