A friend of mine presented a classroom management strategy that spoke on using silliness within the classroom as a way to get students to stop and refocus. Hannah stated in her presentation, “Children need help learning to regulate their emotions. Model what it looks and sounds like to laugh about something funny for a few seconds and then to stop and refocus. For instance, after everyone laughs at something, you might say, “Oh, that was funny. Now, I’m going to take a few deep breathes to get myself focused back onto out discussion.”
It would not come to a shock to my friends and family that I am an outgoing, happy-go lucky, silly type of person. Thus, upon hearing this, I was ecstatic and overjoyed that people do see the importance of brining that silliness into the classroom. That is just how I am and have always been and I don’t intend to change that as I move out of my undergraduate experience into the real world teaching a classroom full of children experience. Now that being said, I do not wish to conceal my silliness deep down in my soul while I am at school. Instead I plan to move forward using my silliness in the classroom.
Throughout my time in school, I always found that the classes I enjoyed the most were the ones that the teacher was silly and liked to have a good time. Now, not saying that I enjoyed the teachers who were so focused on being silly that the class was lacking in content. Because I was also one of those kids who enjoyed learning. But when the teacher was more apt to laugh and make a joke every once in a while, I was more likely to enjoy going to their class. As a classroom teacher you must be able to find this boundary of enough silliness to where the students will still respect you as a teacher and learn from you but they will not take advantage of the silliness and be off task a good majority of each day.
I believe that Hannah was on to something because in her examples she was using silliness in a sense as to teach social skills. Being as no one is perfect, it is okay to laugh off a mistake here and there, however it is not okay to belly laugh on the floor in all situations. This is something that elementary students need to learn because not every situation they encounter is going to be a silly situation and they need to be able to laugh and refocus their attention back to the lesson or speaker or whatever they encounter.
Miss Trone 