Think about and discuss the following age groups in your forum group.

Research them using the

internet or any child development or educational psychology resources you may have in your
school/library etc.

 7-8
 9-10
 12-13
1. What educational expectations are reasonable for that age?
2. What social expectations are reasonable for that age?
3. What emotional expectations are reasonable for that age?
4. What is your experience of working with these age groups? Does your experience of
these age groups match the expectations expressed in your research? (If no, why not?)
5. Did you have a child in any of these age groups whose educational, social or emotional
development did NOT match the usual expectations for that age group? ( If not, in which
ways did they not match?)
6. Collaborate with your group to come up with ways in which you could teach these age
groups how to express their emotions in English.
 You have a class of six year olds. One girl is extremely sensitive. She gets angry, cries and rips
up her work when she gets even just one question wrong.

You quietly observe the interactions between the children during one exercise and see that, as
usual, the children compare their work as they complete a read and colour exercise. The
sensitive girl comments on another child’s work and everything appears to be ok. The other
child looks at the girl’s work and laughs and points at a frog the girl has coloured blue. “Ha, ha!
A blue frog! Look everyone!”

The girl goes red in the face, throws her pens across the room, tears up her work and
barricades herself behind a couple of chairs, hitting the floor angrily with her hand.

Discuss the following in your forum group, below:

Sometimes it is the way we stage the activities, some of it can be the colouring dictation, teacher-
led, then student-led and in the end, the final picture, everyone chooses their own colour for the
frog, and all the colours are great. A lot depends on how we react to mistakes that they make.
Support and acceptance, help with fixing it, if necessary.

Think of a time when you experienced a period of time or an individual incident that caused you
emotional upset. A time when your mind was so clouded with mixed emotions and thoughts that
you felt unable to focus on your job to the best of your ability.

(It is your choice if you want to share the cause of your emotional upset to the rest of your
group. You do not have to share the answers to Q1 and 2 and please do not ask for more
information from others than they wish to give. This exercise is solely intended to help you to
empathise with children with BESD. )

1. What happened?

2. How did you feel?

3. How did your emotions affect your professional performance?

4. Did you receive support from your colleagues?

5. Did your colleagues tell you to “Come into school quietly, to sit down with out
disturbing others with your story and to get on with your work? (This is a regular
occurrence in both language and mainstream schools)
 6. How would you have felt if your colleagues had responded in this way?

7. How can we, as teachers, structure the first five minutes of class in a way that helps
children to settle in to the class, calm down if they need to and to healthily separate life
outside the class from their experience in the class?