Student Contributor: S. Trull
This tool is used to with a Bee stuffed animal named Barnabee. Every Tuesday you sit with your class in a circle and you as the teacher start with Barnabee and remind the students that they have the option to pass then you tell them how you are feeling today.
The tool should be used as a way to help students let out what they are feeling, but it also helps the other students that are listening work on reflective listening. This is a time where nobody is talking unless they have Barnabee so all they are to do is listen to who is talking. A very important key is that you need to remind the students that it is okay to pass and they do not need to share their feelings if they do not want too. I have had experience with this tool and it can get emotional as younger students do have strong emotions, but this is also a way to let them express them in a safe and supporting way.
In the supportive phase you are building a community and students are building a prosocial a behavior during this tool. Barnabee Tuesday helps students with lift each other up and gives them the opportunity to listen to what their friends have to say. This tool does also relates to the preventative phase, during this phase you are creating culture of the room and an environment for your students. This tool again does just that.
More Information –
Tool Source: Walsh
I tried this strategy in my kindergarten class which has around 35 students and surrounding them is an urban area. The tool that I decided to use is the Barnabee Tuesday since my students tend to want to share every thought and emotion they are feeling with their teachers. This tool was challenging to set-up/group but then it became easy once I decided how I wanted to do it. Since my mentor co-teaches I had 2 groups running at the same time, I would go back and forth between groups and the other teachers would manage one group while I was with the other and vise versa. It was easy to teach since I first modeled what to do/say and the students followed. The success I noticed with this tool was that it taught them how to be empathetic and it gave them a chance to share their feelings since at times they only want to share them with adults which helped them solve problems with one another. Adjustments I could do to make it better is mixing up the groups. I kept them with their class which did work, but it would be nice for them to have this experience with their other classmates from the other class.