Whenever I meet someone who has "Behavior" in their job title I ask what they would do about a nonverbal head biter and they always give me a useless answer.
The last one tried to explain that nonverbal kids can still communicate and attempted to explain that to a speech therapist.
I pointed out that she was explaining my job to me while I had asked about her job.
Her response was two full screens on my phone, which difficult to read, so I copied and pasted it into Word, which went crazy because she is a terrible writer and rarely uses punctuation--except in contractions.
She used those every time, but had several run-on sentences.
She didn't capitalize the first word in sentences, but she randomly capitalized words that shouldn't have been.
Word wanted me to change contractions, claiming that it was unprofessional, but ignored "Yeah," and run-on sentences.
Since Word wanted me to make her ramble professional I changed "Very big" to "huge," for example.
I split it into two paragraphs, but three or four would have been better.
She claims that it was the short version, but I shortened it a bit, and think that it should have been vastly shorter.
Pick up the kids. Sit on the floor with them. Pat their chest. Sing romantic songs. Ask how they felt. Say it is okay to feel upset. Ask if biting my head was the correct course of action. Say "I can't understand you, you are still biting my head!" Find out why they got angry. Ask if they should have done something else. Ensure they know they are safe at school and around the staff, except for around Louie the custodian who tries to give kids candy he pulled out of the mop bucket.
Quote:
I wait for one of my frequent trigger children to start to have a meltdown or I will get called in by a teacher when I see the child starting to move, act erratically, or scream. I will grab the child and either pick them up or take them by the hand and move them away from the other children. I will sit on the floor in front of the child, holding one of their hands while patting their chest in a slow rhythmic pattern to slow their heart. As I’m patting their chest, I will do an I love you ritual, picking whichever one the child likes best. This focuses them, calming them down, and makes it so they can listen to you; I see that you are having huge feelings and you are furious. That is OK, adults get upset too. Are you mad because so-and-so took your toy? Are you mad because they are not playing with you? It is my job to observe what has made the child agitated and I will state it in a way that helps them be able to recognize why they are upset.
Once they acknowledge that this is what made them angry, I will then say "Well I see that you hit my friend that is not very nice. I do not like it when people hit me. Do you like it when people hit you?” Usually, the child will nod or say no and then I will reaffirm. “Yes, it hurts. What is something else we could have done instead of hitting our friend?” and in most cases verbal or nonverbal they do not know what to say so I will tell them options on what they could have done. “Well, you know you can always come get a teacher and tell us. I just want to make sure you understand I am a safe person and I will always protect you. You are safe every time you are around me because children get upset and they feel unsafe when they react because they are afraid of what is going to happen. You always reiterate that you are safe and this is a safe place, that all their teachers want to keep them safe, and they are safe at school. It is a long process and that is the shortened version. That is why I did not say so, you cannot explain it is something you just have to see.
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