K Lesson on Coping with Anger

We start a new kindergarten lesson today that focuses on what to do when we're angry. We'll read the book Mouse Was Mad. It is new (purchased for our counseling program by a donor at donorschoose.org!) and I really like it. Throughout the story, other animals stomp, jump, roll on the ground, and scream when they are mad. Mouse tries all those things, but they just end up making his problem worse instead of better. Finally he tries standing very, very still, and taking slow breaths. It works! He feels better! The other animals try, but they cannot get it quite right- Mouse is the expert and all the animals admire his helpful skill for feeling better.

Then, as a class, we'll sort out helpful and hurtful ways to handle anger. Helpful coping strategies are those that make us feel better without hurting people or things with our words, hands, or feet. Some ideas we'll talk about are playing outside, playing a game, drawing or coloring, taking slow breaths, getting a cool drink of water, doing jumping jacks until we get tired, squeezing our muscles tight and then loosening them like a cooked spaghetti noodle, etc. Look for your child to bring home a paper with a few more ideas listed on it, and if you would like a list with even more coping strategies, just let me know and I'll send one home with your child.

We'll also use a balloon to talk about how it is easiest to get control of our anger if we start calming down when we're just a tiny bit angry. Once we start getting really angry, it is more difficult to calm ourselves back down. I will blow up the balloon a little bit at a time to represent several different things making us angry over the course of a day... if we don't do anything to relax, pretty soon we have a huge balloon-sized anger inside us! That is when it is easy to lose control and hard to compose ourselves. If we start making an effort to calm down after just one or two angry incidents, it is usually easier to make it through the rest of the day.

The paper your student brings home will also have The Anger Rule on it: It is OK to feel mad, but it is not OK to act bad! I learned that little rhyme at a conference a year or so ago. Sometimes kids think that feeling mad equals hurting people or things, that the two are tied together and there are not other choices when we're angry. I will try to convey in the lesson that feeling mad does not automatically mean hurting people or things. It is perfectly OK to feel mad and everyone does at one time or another, but that doesn't mean we get a free pass to be disrespectful or aggressive. We can feel mad and make respectful, assertive choices to feel better instead of acting "bad."

I'll see Brown, Aldridge, and Childers' classes this week- everyone else will have their lesson next week. If you have any questions, just let me know!

Thanks for reading! We are glad you are here!