After Social Isolation, Preparing Our Youngest Students to Thrive

My latest for Edutopia

When the school doors opened last fall at Bunche Montessori, early-grade teacher Katie Gerdts quickly realized it would be a tough year.

“That moment when you go to redirect a child—normally not a big deal—and the child just flips out, throws their work,” she recalled, incredulously. “And it just kept happening over and over again with different children, screaming and yelling, massive toddler tantrums.”

Without the benefit of much (if any) normal preschool or day care because of the pandemic, many students in Gerdts’ mixed-age classroom were simply not ready to learn and struggled with basic tasks, social skills, and self-regulation. It wasn’t just the academics—Gerdts and her colleagues at the Fort Wayne, Indiana, magnet school knew to expect lags there—it was skills like sharing classroom materials, taking turns, unpacking backpacks, or sitting still for even short periods of time.

Read more here

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Hi all -

This is just a quick newsletter with a link to a new piece that I did for Edutopia this month. I talked with kindergarten teachers about their experiences last year. They told me that they spent their years helping their students, who showed up with major gaps in social and developmental skills after two years of isolation.

I was struck during the interview by their descriptions of their students’ challenges — kids didn’t respond to their own names, they didn’t know how to interact with peers, they didn’t know how to address adults. As an autism parent, those are all red flags for autism. Due to the pandemic, typical kids were behaving like autistic kids! Holy crap. And teachers helped the kids using methods typically used by special education teachers. So upsetting!

But I’ll talk about all this and more on Wednesday.

Thanks for reading. Laura