Social interactions are critically important for every child’s development. With an ongoing pandemic and accompanying quarantines and lockdowns, it is difficult to calculate the extent to which these conditions have impacted our children. Educators must understand how the isolation endured by young students affected them and how it continues to impact them even today as we have returned to in-person learning.
How Social Isolation Heavily Affected Elementary Students
Social interaction is already more of a challenge for children of today than it was for the children of 30 or even 20 years ago because of the prominence of electronic devices and screen time. This is due in part to the amount of time that children spend on devices. That fact is compounded by the isolation and social deprivation experienced because of the pandemic and consequential lockdowns.
Emotional Outbursts
A significant change I have noticed since returning to in-person learning is the frequency of emotional outbursts. In the past, redirecting a student would not have resulted in any major issues. However, there are far more instances of severe student outbursts than ever before. This can be linked to the isolation experienced by children throughout lockdowns. Isolation, of course, leads to a feeling of loneliness. Research shows that loneliness leads to higher levels of stress.
Coping Mechanisms
Pair that with the fact that young children have not learned coping mechanisms for stress and, therefore, are not equipped with the skills necessary to handle the stress levels they are experiencing. So, as young students return to school and they experience stressful situations, like being in a structured environment with rules after months of being in a less structured environment with no social interactions to navigate, we see students exhibit extreme reactions to minor incidents.
Early Development
The most troubling concern for our younger students compared to older students is the fact that younger students are still in early stages of development and have missed vital socialization building blocks necessary to function properly in a school environment. On top of that, a lot of our current primary students have missed out on preschool as well.
There is a great deal of critical social skills, and social-emotional learning that is developed in preschool as well as learning the basics of the structure and procedures associated with school. When you combine what young students have missed developmentally, academically, and socially, it amounts to a staggering deficit for our young students that is hard to truly know the extent of the impact for, perhaps, years to come.
Helping Your Young Students Through These Struggles
Although the complications caused by these tragic interruptions to our students’ early childhood education development may seem like insurmountable obstacles, there are ways that we, as teachers, can help and support as students learn to adjust and cope in their current environments.
Social Skills
In order to help students, develop social skills, teachers can first do more explicit teaching of social skills. There are a lot of great books available geared towards young students that lend themselves to open discussions and direct instruction regarding social skills.
It is also important to collaborate with school counselors in ways you can work together to improve these skills. Also, working with students in small groups and grouping students according to common social skill deficits can be very beneficial for young students.
Emotional Challenges
Firstly, it is very important for us to recognize that there are far more emotional challenges for our students than there have been in the past. We must be sensitive to this and patient with students as they navigate this. Also, as there are more students experiencing emotional difficulties, it may help to have a “calm down room” or area in your school.
Our school, for example, has a very small room with soft lighting, calming music, pillows, bean bags, and plushies that students can go to as needed to calm down when having emotional difficulty. This has proven to be very helpful for many of our students. Emotional difficulty would be another reason for collaborating with school counselors and utilizing books for young children that address emotional issues.
Problem-Solving
Issues that seem so simple to solve may have many of our students stumped due to the social isolation they have experienced. A lot of these kinds of issues will pertain to conflict resolution with other students. Again, this is an area that will require direct instruction (that would not have been necessary pre-pandemic) but will also help elementary school students immensely in learning to solve problems with their peers in a productive and respectful manner.
Attention Spans
The most important thing to remember is that students do not develop extended attention spans overnight. Therefore, this too will require some training and stamina-building. By frequently changing activities, allowing students to move often, and allowing them to have physical activities breaks in class throughout the day (even mid-lesson) you can keep students engaged and then gradually make academic times longer to slowly improve student stamina as it pertains to attention span and engagement.
By implementing these practices, we can help our students improve, if not overcome, the challenges they face in the aftermath of the pandemic. It is perhaps most important, however, to work to develop meaningful relationships with students by investing time with them regularly and by truly listening to their thoughts and concerns. This can be the most critical piece to helping our students through post-pandemic trauma as well as many difficult situations.
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