What happens when children are socially left out?
Q: We have a little girl who can behave in a ‘silly’ way but recently we have been pleased to see her joining in and socialising well. Another child brought in invitations from home for a birthday party - everyone was invited except her! It seems the parents didn’t want her there. She is distressed. How do we repair the damage?
Jenny: How horrible.
It’s my worst fear to see someone left out so cruelly as that. I know as a
parent with a child in a very tough school full of emotionally needy and
disadvantaged children I would struggle sometimes with a concept of the whole
class birthday party. But you would either go for the option of a handful of
selected friends or the whole class but never the whole class, minus the one or
two you didn’t want there. That is unkind in the extreme.
The damage is done and it was very hurtful.
One of my
consultants has been working on a story for circle time. It features Mouse and
Turtle. It’s all about Millie Mouse sending invitations out, and the invitation
are all proper small printed invitations to everyone in her animal class except
Turtle, because he is so slow and won’t be able to join in the games properly.
All the invitations are read out and then Turtle comes out of the bag and
watches and feels very sad. It’s heart breaking Greek tragedy stuff. Truly, I
think metaphor is your only answer. You need to use puppets, poems and toys to
explore the theme of being left out and how it makes you feel. Again, make ‘We
Are Friends’, a theme for the class and the circle times. In some schools we
have set up a system whereby a girl and a boy are elected as Class Friend for
the day. They have a big fluorescent badge and then they are on Friendship Duty
for the day. This means that they are friendly and helpful to the teacher but,
more importantly, at lunchtime, their task is to make sure that all the
children in their class have someone to play with. After lunch we have the
ritual of Tell and Good Tale, where other pupils thanks the Class Friends for
making sure they were happy and had games to play. In circle time on step four
children would be nominated by other children for asking them into games, being
kind, sharing etc. Again the ethos of friendship for this class has to be so
strong that the child at home in the face or their parents lack of empathy feel
strong enough inside to insist that everyone is included.
You need to think about your school brochure and what it says about inclusion and values. We can never stop this type of situation from happening but it is one of the strongest reasons I have kept going with circle time. None of us can bear the thought of a child distraught at being marginalized. Still, children are resilient, puppets and books are healing, special child of the week is a great strategy and there is much that we can do to sure up the flag of friendship within that class. Good Luck.
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