Antecedent and Setting Event Modifications

The child is young and they want adult attention.

Since circle time appears to be the most difficult time of day for the child, give the child a task to do during circle time that is hands on.

Perhaps the child can hold the eraser that the teacher uses to erase the items on the calendar board.
Perhaps the child has to count everyone who is present and write the number on the attendance sheet. (See where this is going?)
The child needs an active job to do during those non-hands-on activities. This job is going to be giving the child attention up front.
It’s also possible that circle time seems like a very long time to sit for this child since they are not actively engaged physically.
- Maybe this child has tendencies toward hyperactivity.
  - An air filled pillow that affords the child pro-prioceptive movement in their posterior might be helpful.
  - This allows the child to have side to side movement while being seated.

Behavior Teaching

Usually when I present to adults and I’m going to be presenting for eight hours I start the meeting off by telling people that I totally understand that some people will need to get up and move around, stand in the back of the room, or leave to go to the restroom at a time when I haven’t given a break and that it’s perfectly okay with me if the audience does this when they need to. Frequently, I have as many as 20 people who take advantage of this opportunity in any given day. If we as adults can not sit for long periods of time, why do we think young children can do so without getting “crazy”?

When children need to wiggle sometimes the “wiggle” part comes out of their mouths because at least some part of their body is able to be engaged in movement. I have found that many times I can discourage talking if I put some motions into what the children are doing. For example if we are doing the calendar and going over the days of the week or months of the year, I can teach the children sign language for those words. When the children are busy using their hands to sign the days of the week or months of the year it helps them control their behavior. The brain based research would also tell us that this helps the child connect the learning in three modes: verbal, auditory, and kinesthetic. The likelihood of their learning this information increases with every mode we add.

We need to teach children by giving all the children a wiggle break built into the seated time. We need to teach young children especially how to appropriately stand up and stretch when they need to. I’ve been doing a lot of brain based research lately and all the research indicates that children learn best when they are comfortable. If we aren’t comfortable sitting up perfectly straight with our posterior on a hard surface, then why would children be comfortable? I think we all have this vision of Johnny and Susie sitting with perfect posture, with their feet touching the floor and that this is teaching. I remember from my own days in fifth grade the teacher even had specific lines on the floor that our desk legs had to be touching to keep us in a perfect row. It might look nice if you are obsessive compulsive about perpendicular lines, but it really is not good for learning. Real learning looks messy. Children are moving. When I taught children with ADHD, they each had two desks in the room and they had permission to move to one of their other desks as long as I wasn’t talking. This way I taught the children how to move when they needed to wiggle without disrupting the class.

So what I’m saying is that children need to be taught how to move and give themselves the stretch they need without being disruptive. This could be done in social stories. Social Stories by Carol Gray is a great book and can be replicated using the PowerPoint program using pictures of the children in the class as the “stars” of the show. The teacher could show this story to the whole class right before a time when the children will be required to sit for a length of time. It might sound silly, and it might seem that children of course know how to sit. Of course children know how to sit. What children don’t know is how to get rid of the wiggles without causing a scene.

Another variation of teaching children how to wiggle would be using the Positive Behavior Support model of teaching a new behavior a) teach what it is, b) model what it is, c) give the children opportunity to practice the new behavior, and d) catch children being good at the new behavior and label it for them. We have research indicating that we can improve behavior by 80% just by pointing out what one child is doing correctly.

Shores, R.E., Gunter, P.L., & Jack, S.L. (1993). Classroom management strategies: Are they setting events for coercion? Behavioral Disorders, 18, 92-102.

Consequence Modification

We assume from the information given that the function of the behavior is attention from the adult. If this is true, then we need to not feed that behavior when it happens with attention. This would mean ignoring inappropriate behavior and giving as much attention as possible to the correct behavior that we have taught. If this behavior is truly being fed by attention, then we can pre-feed the “hungry” by giving attention before the times most frequently abused. The only way to know this is to collect data and know exactly which times are most likely to produce high disruptions.

Academically

I am assuming this is a young child since the teacher that turned in this card mentioned circle time. It could be that the child is disrupting because the content being covered is too difficult for him or her. It might be a good idea to do a referral to speech to determine if there are any language disorders that could be addressed to help this child.

Long Term Plan

Give the child the life-long skill of being able to know when it’s appropriate to move and stretch and how to do that without disrupting others around them. We can all think of obnoxious adults we see in movie theaters who we wish had learned these skills when they were younger.