Comfortable Cafeteria - New & Improved!

If you ask a current (or former!) elementary student about their lunch time, you're likely to get some pretty emotional language.  We hope they love it, but sometimes they don't.  And then there's the tricky concept of adults helping kids find the right balance between having fun and getting too loud and rambunctious.  As part of our Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) framework at Horace Mann, we are gradually implementing the Comfortable Cafeteria to help all of us enjoy positive and pleasant mealtimes.

I've blogged about this before.  We first tried the Comfortable Cafeteria in the Spring of 2018 with our 3rd graders.  We learned a lot!  Back in the fall of 2018, our 5th graders went through the 6 week curriculum, led by our intrepid Occupational Therapy team.  We'd implemented some ideas based on our prior experience..and learned still more!

The lead OT on this project, Suzanne Scott, suspected the lessons taught in the cafeteria, itself, would be more effective if kids and teachers knew more about them ahead of time.  So, she worked with 5th grade teachers and their students to produce short videos of our 5th graders talking about the Comfortable Cafeteria.  So, now that we are doing the curriculum with our 4th graders (who also experienced it last year in 3rd grade), we have a system where the 4th grade classroom teachers introduce the lesson topic with the video before it happens.  Of course, we still send information home to parents, too.

Last week, our OTs hosted Comfortable Cafeteria Jeopardy, with each table competing to answer questions in categories linked to the program.  It was great to see their enthusiasm and to hear their high quality answers, too.

We look forward to the next five weeks and the skills our students will grow.  Hopefully families will even see some of the skills transferring to home and community, as well!  Here's the link to the program if you'd like to learn more  https://everymomentcounts.org/view.php?nav_id=1