Grief in the classroom: So much in the first few months of school

My son's formal education journey started this month, although an exciting time it is also an interesting time to reflect on practice and experiences that I have had.

I am always impressed at the work of a kindergarten teacher and the daily battle to complete the most basic of tasks always overwhelmed me! I have to commend our kindergarten teacher in the amazing work she does with our son and the other students, and the approach she has taken has been impressive, even when we brought up a touchy grief subject she worked to create a positive change in her classroom. We are very lucky to have her and her experience.

Terry Fox Airlifted from Thunder Bay,
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/terry-fox

As the year started I realized some of the impressive challenges of teaching that I had never thought of before. In the first two and half months of school, there are some pretty heavy and challenging social topics/issues: Terry Fox, Orange shirt day, Halloween, Remembrance day. All three of these events can deal with death, loss, grief, sadness, tragedy, religion, and so much more. Yet all teachers are expected to handle these with very little prior training or experience. They only have their own prior experiences and an outline provided by their board or mandates from their administration.

I remember how challenging it was to go into a school under the umbrella of a critical incident response team (CIRT), and to help set teachers up for success during the most challenging of scenarios. Yet teachers are asked to deal with similar scenarios repeatedly at the start of the year and are very ill-prepared to deal with the questions, ideas, and challenges of many of these events; while also being in a public education setting. 

I wonder how we can better support our teachers in these moments? I have recently found two really great resources on dealing with grief and young children one is the Sesame street in communities site https://sesamestreetincommunities.org/topics/grief/ the videos offer a great place to start with conversations with young kids, the resources are great in that they offer information for different age groups. The other is https://www.dougy.org/ it is a great place for those working with students either going through grief or other sensitive subjects.

The key in all of the information and literature seems to centre around the following trends: be honest, create opportunities for kids to grieve, be aware of the kid's age and that at each age kids will have different cognitive capabilities and understanding surrounding death. I found it very interesting that as kids grow they will continue to grieve as they go through different cognitive stages of development and make connections with past experiences. As they begin to understand death, they will have questions about it based on their new understandings.  I think these resources can help with some of these questions and challenging times. 



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