origin story

It was three months into the school year and a class of 7- to 9-year-olds that had sent the previous year’s classroom teacher on a stress leave was already on the way to doing it again.  A cohort since kindergarten, they had cultivated together a culture of sullenness and defiance.

Individual and class contracts, check marks and stars, Individual Education Plans, privileges withdrawn, privileges awarded, the ‘Problem Solving Room’, ‘Marbles in a Jar’, class meetings, class celebrations, behaviour logs, meetings with parents, responsive seating arrangements—all these strategies we had tried. They had not worked.

I was their Special Education Resource teacher. I decided to offer play. I brought sandtrays and miniatures to my classroom and in the daily 90-minute Language block, 12 of those students built worlds in individual sandtrays and shared the stories they created there.  The children’s own stories “breathed out” in their individual play became the working material by which they were motivated to “breathe in” the core proficiencies of the Oral and Written Language curriculum.

It worked!