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Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Children Part 2: Facing Our Feelings - with crafts!

11/2/2017

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No, we’re not knitting away our sadness or sculpting our fears - at least not today. We are feeling some more feelings, assisted by one of our favorite craft projects: the emotions face!
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LOVE these things! Use them a million ways:
  • Draw attention to all the different parts of our bodies (particularly faces) that we use to show emotion - whether we realize it or not.
  • Make an expressive face showing an emotion, and ask the kids try to copy it with their emotion faces.
  • Adjust your emotion face to show a feeling and ask the kids to guess what emotion the face is showing.
  • Ask the kids to copy each other's expressive faces on their emotion faces. 
  • Give kids small mirrors and ask them to copy their own expressive faces.
  • Ask the children to show feelings on their emotions face, then draw those faces on a separate piece of paper and label them with the appropriate emotion.
  • Use during story time - "who can show me on the emotion face how you think the bunny is feeling?"
  • Once the children are used to them, incorporate them into self-regulation and problem-solving
    • "Can you show me on the emotions face how you are feeling/how you think your friend feels/how you would feel if... "
    • or "I notice that your face looks like the angry face [display on emotions face]. Did I read your face correctly; is that how you are feeling? How can we help you feel like this face [display happy emotions face]?"​

And many more. But before you can use them, we need to make them....

Get Ready to Craft!

Assemble:
  • Face and Feature Template (download below)
  • Scissors
  • Hole punch
  • Crayons/markers for decorating face
  • Brass fasteners
  • Base material: cardboard, cardstock, paper plates, or other. See below.
If you plan to make one face durable enough for the whole class to play with, go with cardboard - cut out cardboard to glue the paper face and features onto. 
​
If you're making several faces, I say skip the cardboard in favor of cheap paper plates. We love to have the kids each make their own Emotions Face, so our execution doesn’t need to be highly
durable so much as highly do-able in repetition. 

Ok.... it's also because 
more pliable materials reduce scissor fatigue - or whatever it’s called when you’ve been cutting out so many things, or cutting such hard-to-cut things, that the shape of the scissor handle becomes permanently imprinted around the base of your thumb….
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Instead, I prefer a material that can be bent and cut, and have holes punched in it, with relative ease.

Cardboard does not meet this standard for me, so
 grab some cheap plain paper plates from your local pizzeria (or order them). Bonus: they are already face shaped, which saves time cutting out a lot of blank face circles!


Our hole punchers can’t reach more than an inch or two beyond the border of the face. So unless you have a very fancy long-necked hole punching device, you’ll need to fold the face in order to punch holes in it to attach the features.

Full credit to Mr. Printables for creating the template pictured above! Downloadable right here:
emotions face blank template.pdf
File Size: 68 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Make A Face!
Paper Plate Edition...
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We often skip the tears/cheeks as I feel they can be more hassle than useful (plenty of ways to show sad without actual crying), but some people like them. If you want to use the cheeks/tears, glue them back-to-back. Then thread a needle with thread or skinny yarn through the top of the cheek/tear pair.
  • You can put make a small hole in the face with the needle and put both ends of the thread through that hole on the face; tape the thread ends very securely to the back of the face. I think my fingers are too big to do this but you may have better luck.
  • Or you can tie off thread ends into a loop, punch holes for brass fasteners above the cheek area, then place the thread loop over fastener; loose enough to be able to flip the cheeks into tears, but small enough that the cheek won’t droop down to the chin when you attach it.
(If you discover a simpler way to do this, I’d love to hear about it.)  
Alternative: If you’re willing to eventually lose/squash some of the facial features when they are not attached, to sacrifice a little precision in the manipulating of the features, and to invite Mr Potato Head style feature-swapping, you could ditch all the hole punching and fasteners and just use velcro dots to attach all the features.

All Done!
Bring a Bitty City Players Social-Emotional Learning workshop to your school! Contact us here

Leave a comment by clicking on the blue "Comments" right above or below this post.
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Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Children:   Part 1

10/25/2017

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Today we’re feeling our feelings, kiddos! Social-emotional learning (SEL) is one of the most important parts of early childhood education, in the classroom and at home.  
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If we formally incorporate SEL into lessons for toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and in early elementary, we equip children with the resources to handle social-emotional challenges - and save them lots of frustration (and potentially lots of money in therapy) later on in life.

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It's a Scary World out there...

9/20/2017

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Hurricanes and earthquakes and destroying countries and terrorism and more hurricanes... Yipes! Today we're offering a few ideas for helping kids handle some of those fears.
Talk of destruction and suffering are all around us, and inescapably all around our children. It's scary! Add to that all the things that might be lurking in the dark or under our beds - any time we cannot see something, or do not understand how it works or why it happens, or find ourselves in a new situation we cannot predict, we may feel fear or anxiety - at any age. 


Use Dramatic Play
We like to use dramatic play to help children cope with fears that are unlikely to occur (what if aliens attack?), and talking and games to handle fears that are more in the sphere of possibility (what if a hurricane comes to get us?)


We act out what might happen, with a silly or happy twist.
One of our favorite books to introduce this particular dramatic play activity is Ed Emberly's Go Away Big Green Monster. Monsters aren't so scary when you think of them as a collection of silly pieces instead of one big creature.


We like to have kids draw something they are fearful of, and then we work together as a group to figure out a way we could make that fear feel less scary.


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Positive Thinking and Growth Mindset (with Printable!)

9/13/2017

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Happy Wednesday! Today is International Positive Thinking Day! So today’s resource focuses on Positive Thinking and the Growth Mindset.


Say hi to 

Keep Tryin’ Lion and 
​
Keep At It Rabbit!
​See below for a printable tool to use them in your classroom or at home
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Keep Tryin' Lion
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Keep At It Rabbit

If you’re not yet familiar with the Growth Mindset, it’s a way of thinking - backed up by scientific research - to develop perseverance and resilience in the face of difficulty, and it opens up doors to new successful and quantifiable strategies for teachers and parents, in fact for anyone who is with a child when that child encounters something difficult.

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Favorite Books to Inspire Dramatic Play

8/30/2017

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Happy Wednesday again! Caroline here with our go-to books as a basis for lessons full of creative play. Many of these are deservedly well-loved classics. They are my favorites because each one is so rich with possibility, in different ways for different age groups.  At this point, I can't pass up an opportunity to explore with these books and I ONLY read them out loud to kids when I know we will have time to create our own imaginary worlds right afterwards 😍

They work well in small settings too, if you’re looking for some fun parent-child or family time activity.
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I’m A Frog! 
from Mo Willems’ Elephant & Piggie series.
​

If you’re not familiar with this one - or if you’re familiar with every other Elephant & Piggie except this one, here’s the rundown: 
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Piggie pretends to be a frog...
Elephant worries (dramatically and with great panache, of course) that Piggie really IS a frog...
Piggie assures Elephant it is pretend, and that anyone can pretend... 
Elephant overcomes his anxiety and pretends to be a cow.
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A great book for those very young and/or just beginning to grasp the concept of cooperative intentional dramatic play, use it as a jumping off point for a conversation about pretending, giving each child the opportunity to demonstrate for the class how to pretend that he/she is something else, or inviting the children as a group to pretend they are something - show me how a horse runs! Don’t forget to shake your horse tail! 


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Welcome!

8/8/2017

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Welcome to Monkey Business, the Bitty City Blog! 
Teaching and growing creative kids ages 1-10.

We’re Caroline and Danielle, co-founders of Bitty City Players. We are both New York City teachers with theater backgrounds, who feel that some of the fundamental rules of theater and improv like, “Yes...and”, “Listen and Respond”, and  “Acting is doing” apply perfectly to the classroom as well.  

​Based upon our experiences in the classroom, both as teachers and as students, we know that engaging in hands-on, brains-on, put-your-whole-self-in activities is the best way to connect to kids and get them excited about what they're learning.  We deeply believe that dramatic play and sensory work are the most effective educational tools with young children and we incorporate both into our innovative theater and science curricula.
Executive Director Caroline Patterson
Caroline
Curriculum Director Danielle Cohn
Danielle
We want to keep joy and playfulness in our learning - in the classroom and at home.
If you’re a teacher or parent (or both!) or otherwise involved with the education of children 10 and under, we’re here for you!

​You’ll hear plenty from us, but you will also hear from some of our fellow teachers and moms, activity specialists (in theater, science, OT, and more), and the occasional school administrator and guest artist.

On the Bitty City Blog (aka Monkey Business), you’ll find:
  • Tips and ready-to-go resources for early childhood and elementary teachers 
  • Ideas to help kids embrace imagination and entertain themselves during downtime and waiting time. 
  • Original songs for lessons and transition times
  • Favorite books and materials for different age groups
  • Resource lists - online and offline.
  • Practical advice for communicating with teachers, parents, administrators, and students.
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Our goal for each blog post (every other Wednesday - sometimes a little more often) is to support you and make life a little easier and more fun.

We can’t wait to share our ideas and hear yours! We look forward to your feedback, questions, counterpoints, suggestions, additions, or whatever you’ve got. Our aim is to create a supportive and helpful community. To that end, all respectful discussion is welcome in the comments, and we will do our best to read and respond to your comments promptly.

As we enjoy the precious last weeks of summer, and prepare for the start of another exciting school year, we want to inspire and motivate you to keep thinking out of the box, and bring joy and magic into the classroom - and every room!

Want more Bitty City? Curious about our Dramatic Artists, Science Explorers, or Sensory Players programs, our After School Classes and NYC PreK Workshops? Planning a Party or a vacation Camp?

Check out our site, subscribe to our monthly newsletter (it’s short and full of cute pictures and bonus resources), say hi via email, add our blog to your RSS feed, follow us Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest, like us on Facebook. Heck, give us a call!
And of course…

​We’ll see you again next Wednesday!

Playfully Yours,
Caroline and Danielle
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    ​Bitty City Players offers theater and science enrichment through after-school programs, in-school workshops, and events for ages 1-10 in NYC.

    ​Learn more about the organization and our team here.

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