Why develop a group room?

Children who are finding it difficult to engage in learning and whose behaviour is causing concern in the classroom have often missed essential early learning experiences. There are several reasons why this may be so. However we have found that many of the children have experienced or witnessed emotional and physical neglect or violence and/or early trauma by the time they have reached their fourth birthday.

In order to provide an environment where the children can be helped, it is important to understand that the earliest learning is mostly implicit and located in the right brain. Such learning is pre-verbal and without language. Instead these early memories are somatic, that is ‘the body's learned memories’ and permeate the infant’s senses.

Neuroscience has helped the understanding of how the brain functions.

The brain grows through the development of neuronal pathways that connect up the lower parts of the brain - reptilian and limbic - to the higher functioning pre-frontal cortex. The quality of the relationship impacts on the growth of these neurological networks. To be positively effective the relationship needs to incorporate values of acceptance, empathy and compassion for the child, alongside remaining curious and playful.

The shared experience of emotional attunement particularly delight, joy, excitement and fun have been shown to produce growth ‘fertilising’ chemicals as well setting up neurological pathways that enable the child to be more open, capable of loving, discerning, able to think and engage in learning.

When considering how a school might help the children it is important to think about how to best access missed yet still needed emotional learning. The focus is twofold:
1.   The quality of relationship that is developed between the child and their teacher/TA in the learning environment.
2.   The opportunity to learn through experiencing the relationship rather than through cognitively learning about relationship.

As the needed learning is experiential and not cognitive, using a designated room in addition to the classroom can facilitate a more creative space for learning.

The group activity room can be an additional resource for all children in school. For those children who have had Thrive assessments, the programme will have identified the most useful developmental sequence of experiences to target each child (Being, Doing, Thinking etc) These will be clearly selected on the child’s Action Plan.

These assessments and Action Plans will help you to decide whether the child needs:
One to one work only or
One to one work and some time in an Thrive group or
Thrive group time only.

The Action Plan will also suggest ways of working with the children, activities and interventions that support them to have the experiences they need and can be used by class teachers, support staff and parents/ carers.

An important and necessary consideration when planning group work is the assessment of the child’s capacity to work effectively with other children.

Where to start :

Setting up a Thrive group activity room
For all children using the room their need to feel welcome, safe, special and that they belong is important.
Basic resources/equipment available for all children

Having a special place to leave things that are individual to the child: bags on a hook, pockets, drawers, named or with special shape/image
Warm and carpeted room
Comfortable seats, soft cushions
Equipment for provision of music
Adequate space for personal movement and shared activities
Facilities for providing refreshments
Having pictures of the children and teachers in the area
Variable lighting   
Curtains that provide some privacy

Structuring the room: The Thrive group activity room provides opportunities that build on the child’s learning experiences in the 1:1 sessions. The purpose of structuring the activities within the room is to create focused spaces for adults to be with children in ways that directly provide needed developmental experiences. The activities are designed to address the specific learning needs that have been identified i.e. Being, Doing, Thinking, Power& Identity.

Resources for supporting Being
When children are being supported with their Being needs, they need a safe, quiet, low stimulation area, where they can also rest. This area must have good visual contact with a teacher. There needs to be no place in the area where the children can hide from the teacher or each other:
Soft cushions: a mixture of primary and pastel colours with different textures
Soft blankets
A box or basket with different fabrics in it for sensory experiences
Music: relaxation e.g. themes of sea etc, lullabies
Mobiles (not mobile phones)
Soft lighting
Use of different smells, eg aroma therapy oils such as lavender
Mirrors
Water bottles

Resources for supporting Doing
There needs to be two different Doing areas, one that supports exploration and experimentation, and another that supports the safe expression of emotions.

Exploration and experimentation: places for the children to explore/hide, 'make dens’, create own games, dress up, draw, paint, model-make, build (blocks, Lego, boxes etc), sand tray with miniatures, puppets, soft toys and any other ideas teachers have.

Safe expression of emotions:
Anger: Provision of soft ‘bats’ or cushions for hitting safe surfaces, papers for ripping, material for screwing up, ‘dog-pull’ toys for tugging; puppets for role play; drums and percussion instruments for making noise. There needs to be clear understood rules in place e.g. identified timings/space etc. This activity always needs supervision. We suggest that there is a regular slot for this in the sessions.
Sad, scared and happy: music and books that help the understanding and expression of all emotions: an area for dancing and drama, quiet space to withdraw to, worry dolls and any other ideas teachers have.

Resources for supporting Thinking
As well as supporting the child's thinking capacity in a specific area of the room, it is important that the adults take lots of opportunities in the every day classroom, to acknowledge and develop thinking skills. The frontal lobe in the brain is always engaged when we think. Stimulation of the frontal lobe activity is best achieved in the context of a safe and caring relationship and appropriate stimulation, encouragement and role-modelling. It is an on-going process that is an integral part of the teacher/child relationship. Take every opportunity to acknowledge and praise the child’s thinking, eg in their communications, sharing of ideas, capacity to plan, order, sort etc. and as they learn to take responsibility for the choices they make, their feelings, thinking and actions.

Activities that require focused space might include: games that incorporate turn-taking, memory games, listening and repeating games, naming and sorting games, objects to categorise with charts to fill, word games, group story telling (one line each, needing a beginning, middle and end), reporting games, choosing options, labelling games, sequencing games etc. The activities are designed to help the child to gain confidence in having words, using words, having ideas, communicating ideas, listening to others, communicating understanding, sequencing (e.g. sentences in a story reproduced on card and jumbled up, tasks to be done before an activity can start - to be put into order).
An ‘ideas’ chair: a place to sit and think, imagine and / or ask for help with what the child does not know how to do.

Time-in-Thinking: A designated place, such as a particular comfortable supportive chair, to be used when a child needs to think about something that they have done that is unacceptable in the Activity Room e.g. been disrespectful towards a teacher or another child. The child is directed to the chair to think about why they have been asked to go there…to think about what they were feeling and how they may manage the situation differently in the future. The child is left for a few minutes and then has 1:1 help from the teacher to learn from what has happened. For children with interruptions at Being or Doing, the ‘Time-in-Thinking’ is inappropriate as full access to their frontal lobe/thinking capacity is not yet ‘wired-up’.

Thrive rooms are spaces where children and adults learn about and experience being caring, compassionate, curious, interested, playful, capable, creative, accepting, appreciating, unique, and competent.

Practical issues when working with children:

Safety: the room must provide physical safety for the children at all times. This must include the safe containment of the children’s complex emotional needs, often expressed through more challenging behaviours.
Positive Relationships enhanced by the physical environment.
Trust: The children’s experience of being and feeling safe at all times is the foundation for them to gain trust in the adults who are helping them.

The adults will need to be experienced by the children as safe, predictable, and dependable in a relationship that is warm, nurturing and with clear boundaries.

Regulation:  The children will experience the relationship between themselves and the adults as a source of stability and calm. The adults ability to remain calm when the children are dysregulated will, over time, help them learn how to self-soothe and regulate their often fragile and volatile emotional states and/or to safely express ‘held-on-to’ emotions. This relationship can be drawn on following an ‘incident’, helping children to calm and re-enforcing their skills.

Developmentally needed new and reparative experiences: Through the positive relationship with the adult and the appropriate activities in the room, the child can be provided with new and/or reparative experiences.

Practise: Through practise and new experiences the child can learn and develop newly acquired skills and attributes.

Rehearse: The children can complete learning gaps and have a safe opportunity to rehearse new skills and new ways to be, which will enhance their learning.

Maintaining relationships with the children:
The importance of the relationship is paramount from the moment of contact between the adult and a child. This is central to the Thrive approach. Dan Hughes helpfully describes the key essentials of healthy relationships between adults and young children as the adults having an attitude that embraces being Playful, Loving, Accepting, Curious and Empathic (PLACE).

Children with interruptions at Being and Doing will need to be collected from classrooms and escorted to the Thrive group room.

Where children are being transported from one venue to the Thrive provision or Centre, the Thrive experience must happen from the moment of collection.  This will involve greeting, collecting, accompanying, ensuring safety, saying something to emphasise each child’s special individuality and developmentally appropriate activities throughout the journey.

Rituals
Arrival and leaving rituals: when each child’s name is used and each child says how they are/or something that is important for them. Each child should be expected to say something and helped if necessary (opting out gives some children an opportunity to stay disconnected).
Be aware that Thrive children are likely to experience changes, holidays, departures, arrivals, differences in routines, new people or events with difficulty. Use Being activities and approaches to help to prepare them and to help them to re-enter the space.

Use of focused spaces
Guided by the assessments and Action Plans for each child, the staff will have a clear idea of individual children’s needs. It may be helpful to gently direct the children towards areas in the room that would best support these needs. (It is important to remember to use questioning as little as possible with children who have been assessed as having Being or Doing needs.)

Examples of positive intervention supporting developmental need:
Being: Adult in charge, providing for child, creating necessary experience:
Adult:  “I think you might need to have a very relaxing afternoon. Let’s go and spend some time together in the Being corner.”
Adult: ‘‘You look lovely today. Let’s go and have a look in the mirrors.“

Doing: Adult accompanying child, inviting the child into chosen activity. NB the importance of providing a commentary of the experience:
Adult: “You have a lot of energy today. Let’s play the drums together.”
Adult: “Look at all those boxes. Let’s see what they are like.”
Adult: “You see that heap of things over there? Could you help me to sort them out? How shall we do it?”

Thinking: Adult encouraging child to engage in activity; offering a way to use or play with it to develop thinking skills:
Adult: "There are three things we can do now X, Y or Z. Will you choose for us please?”
Adult: “I am wondering about us doing ‘x’. Can you think of how we might do this?"

Themes
Develop themes for the session, e.g. Special people or animals; memory boxes; things and or people or pets that I miss; dreams I have; things I am good at/interested in; ‘I love…; I hate….’ / I like…; I don’t like…’

Building Block focus sessions
At other times consider having part of the session focused on one of the Building Blocks of experience e.g. Being, Doing or Thinking. Most children regardless of their Thrive assessment will benefit from revisiting Being and Doing.
Being: e.g. listening to music or stories; dreaming on cushions; visualising together, rubbing hand lotion into hands.
Doing: e.g. exploring textures, shapes, weights, tubes, tunnels: stretching, curling, moving across the room in different ways; building; dismantling.
Thinking: paint colours and shapes for different emotions; show each other movements or gestures for different emotions or different ways to say hello; make a sequence of these movements and copy it; provide opportunities for limited choice e.g. choices about how to do things rather than whether to do them and choices between limited safe options.

Play
Most children will not have had enough development experience of play. Play is also optimally explored in a sequential way:
Supervised play with limited objects and a trusted adult: Treasure Baskets.
Supervised heuristic play with natural safe objects: free exploration with the adult / parent/ carer watching, noticing, paying attention.
Accompanied play with adult commentary: noticing, offering words and sounds that attune to the child’s experience, describing, delighting in. No questions.
Structured opportunities for free safe play: exploratory, imaginary and representational: home corners, dens, objects, dressing-up clothes, sand trays with miniatures, soft toys, puppets. Adult ensures safety, shows interest, gives permission, encourages if needed, is 'there' but does not interact unless invited.
Games and playing with others, maybe first with a adult or trusted peer, then in pairs or groups or teams.
Whole group collaborations.
 
Messy play and clearing up
Role model both the permission to make a mess and enjoy playing with messy things (clay, foam, soapsuds, paint, mud, sticking, cutting etc) and the need to clear and tidy up. Children who have used the Being area would not be expected to tidy this area. They need to have a positive experience of dependency so that adults take responsibility for providing and for clearing up. Children using the Doing area will need someone to support them in the tidying up process, modelling and alongside. Children in the Thinking area can be shown how to tidy-up after themselves and then encouraged to do it.

The importance of fun
The significance of shared fun, enjoyment, excitement and enthusiasm cannot be over-stated. Shared moments of pleasure and shared games and laughter release a delicious mix of ‘feel-good’ chemicals in the brain that develop the pathways to curiosity, motivation, focused attention, enjoyment, general trust and happiness.

 
Talking to develop a child’s understanding of meaning and development of reflective thinking
Remember it is often useful to expand and affirm the children’s understanding of moment-by-moment experiences, by providing a running commentary. This helps build the child’s healthy understanding of life and different situations. The naming of things and experiences both increases children’s vocabulary and comprehension and is an important foundation for later learning. As teachers and support staff we have been trained how to ask questions. This can get in the way of playing and become directed learning. Be aware of this and use questions sparingly, make them open-ended e.g. How? Or invite them into thinking through wondering aloud. “I wonder what would happen if….”

Introduce more thinking opportunities in conversation with the children. Give gentle opportunities to extend thinking in interaction with the children e.g. "What do you think might happen now?", "X seems very frightened. What might he need?”, “Y is very angry. She might hurt herself or someone else. What do you think would help her?”

Remember the importance of listening to and being with children. We learn a lot and they learn how to be.

Ending
Make sure that there is a secure closing down for the session so that everyone gets to feel safe, calm and able to leave. A ritual will help to create safety. Anticipate what might be coming next. Some Being children will need help to manage this. When children have been in a Thrive group and are at the early stages of their development, they may need to be escorted back to class individually.

A whole school approach
As the approach becomes a way of working for the whole school or centre, it has the potential to:
Enhance the quality of relationships (in school, between children, between staff, with parents/ carers, with other professionals)
Build learning power and emotional capacity (resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness)
Support pupils’ readiness to learn, engage with learning and progress in learning
Extend the emotional literacy of all pupils and staff
Contribute to the raising of levels of attainment and achievement.

The Thrive approach can support your school to address Every Child Matters, the Children’s Plan, Choosing Health, issues of Integrated Working, the Team around the Child and the Common Assessment Framework.