Discovery News
Week of November 2
Weekly News
Goal setting with co-teachers
Math PD
Tuesday-CLR Cadre visit
Discovery is a polling place for voters- please don't park in front
Collaborative Planning
Wednesday- Flu Shots 9-11
CLR Cadre visit
Data Teams 2:30 Media Center
Thursday- Fire Drill 1:15
Literacy Team- Media Center
Math Team- Alison's classroom
PBIS Team- Media Center
Collaborative Planning
Friday
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to:
Joe Thoreson 11/3
Cherie Franke 11/8
Upcoming Events
11/10 Veteran's Assembly 8:00
11/12 Picture Retakes11/13 Conference forms go home
11/19 Conferences 3:00-7:15
11/20 PBIS Assembly 8:00
11/20 Pizza with the Principal
11/23 Professional Development
11/24 Conferences 1:30-8:00
Helping a Traumatized Child in the Classroom
2) Create calm, predictable transitions.
3) Praise publicly and criticize privately.
4) Do Mindfulness activities.
5) Take care of yourself!!!
"Self care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel." Eleanor Brownn
The Scourge of Complex Trauma by Joyce Doredo
Most of us have experienced some kind of traumatic event in our lives when a situation so overwhelmed us that our brain and body were unable to cope with it. Depending on our internal and external resources, most of us were probably able to recover. However, children who live in under-resourced communities—where domestic and neighborhood violence, racial discrimination, and poverty are more prevalent—can develop post-trauma difficulties after experiencing what is calledcomplex trauma.
Complex trauma occurs through repeated and prolonged exposure to trauma-inducing situations, most of which take place in a care-giving situation. When a child can’t rely on a close caregiver for comfort and safety—whether due to the caregiver’s own emotional suffering or because the caregiver is the source of trauma—that young person’s ability to metabolize and recover from toxic stress gets seriously hampered.
The metaphor Joyce uses in her work with schools to explain the effects of complex trauma is that of a vinyl record. When a song is played again and again, a groove is worn into the record. If, when playing a different song, someone accidentally knocks the record player, the needle will skip across the record and land in the deepest groove, playing that song yet again. Even when you reach the end of the song, sometimes the groove is so deep the needle skips back to play it once more.
Like a needle on a record player, complex trauma wears a groove in the brain. So when something non-threatening happens that reminds us of a traumatic incident, our bodies replay the traumatic reaction—mobilizing us to either run from or fight the threat, while shutting down other systems that help us think and reason. If this happens over and over, we become more easily triggered into that fear response mode, never giving our bodies time to recover. After awhile, as we adapt to this chronic triggering, our behavior can seem crazy or rude when taken out of the context of trauma.
For a child in a classroom, something as simple as the teacher raising his or her voice to get everyone’s attention or accidentally getting bumped by another classmate can steer that child into this groove. When triggered, the child’s out-of-proportion emotional and sometimes physical reaction often makes no sense whatsoever to the teacher, making it difficult for the teacher to respond appropriately.