After watching her lunge toward another child's work in an attempt to rip up paper I realized I had two choices- I could fight the pent-up energy inside her or I could look for ways to let it out- on my terms.
I found a big bag of old crayons stuffed in the back of one of my cabinets.
"Break these" I instructed. "We need small crayons." (Our occupational therapist really had told me that I needed to break all of our crayons into smaller pieces so I wasn't completely pulling this out of thin air).
She looked at me like I was crazy.
"I need you to help me break these" I repeated calmly and handed her the bulging gallon size ziplock bag.
I returned to my reading group and watched her our of the corner of my eye as she sat and broke each one, piece by piece.
When she was done I told her I needed them to be even smaller.
Throughout the day she'd occasionally leave what she was doing and bounce back over to the crayons to break some more. Her brow furrowed and she tightened her muscles as she broke those big kindergarten-size crayons into tiny pieces. So much energy built up inside her tiny body.
Unfortunately because of testing we couldn't go out and let her run around on the playground but we tried to sing and be silly as much as we could in a controlled, safe way to help her get that energy out.
We survived the day and now have a large bucket of small, broken crayons to show for it- just what our fine motor skills require. (She was able to repeat, over and over again that we only break broken crayons if the teacher tells us to). Now I just need to find other acceptable tension-releasing projects that let me control any destruction that could happen in the room. Hmmmm.... maybe we'll do an art project that needs lots of construction paper ripped up into confetti.
2 comments:
Someone (it might have been you) suggested to me to have kids pull the plastic rings that connect six packs of sodas and such. We don't drink much of anything that comes in cans at our house but when we do I snag those plastic rings now rather than cutting them apart and throwing them away. At the start of the year a little kindergarten buddy across the hall would use them when he came to my room to take a break. He loved pulling as hard as he could again and again to break the plastic.
We have a ton of small broken crayons. If you soak them in water overnight the wrappers come off easily. Then we used them in a shape and sorting lesson. We sorted them into colors, placed them in muffin tins and a couple of other shaped muffin/candy making things. We mixed colors to see what would happen. My kindys love coloring with these reshaped crayons.
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