Good Circle

Many, many moons ago, in my first or second year of teaching, I taught a weekly general music class.  As they walked in the room each week, I would ask them how their day was.  More often than not, I would be bombarded with "oh, my brother hit me", "my mom said I couldn't play outside", "my dad took away my toy truck because I wet my bed."  After a few weeks, I was like, "dude, you're five.  How bad can your lives be?"

I quickly welcomed to our weekly curriculum something I call "The Good Circle".  Each week, after I took attendance, we'd do our Good Circle.  We'd go around the circle and share with each other one good thing that happened to us that day.  I didn't need to be earth-shattering, like "I found out we're getting a puppy and a pony".  It could be silly like, "I had four oreos instead of only three at snack."  Whatever.  Just tell me something good that happened.  Please.  Not saying that life's all rosy.  Just saying please don't throw up on me your bad-news-grumpiness at our first glance of the day.

Now, (horrifyingly) many years later (my God, I've been teaching for over 15 years...) I still do nearly weekly Good Circles in my musical theater classes.  Does a Good Circle have anything to do with singing or dancing?  Nope.  Performing on stage?  Nope.  But it has to do with life.  And that's why we do it.  If you dwell on the shitty stuff, your life feels shitty.  And the people around you start to feel shitty because of it.

Anyway, I think I'm instituting a "Good Circle" policy within my Four Family.  Whether they like it or not.  Look out.  If it works for as many kids as I've taught over the years, it can work for them too!