HOLIDAY HELPERS

We helped the gentlemen from the Army and U.S. Marine Corps
load some of the packages for the Toys for Tots drive this holiday season.
Wow, the Ox Ridge families are generous!

DECEMBER EXCITEMENT

Here we are at the Maritime Aquarium,
managing our excitement just fine!
What a great day we had!
(We just missed our buddy, SS, who wasn't able to join us this time.)

2nd Steps Social Skills

We started a new unit this week:  Emotion Management

Well!  We know we are very excited at this time of year, but the goal of this unit is to help us identify and manage strong feelings.  During the unit, we hope to understand strong feelings, recognize them when we feel them, and use Calming-Down steps to calm down our strong feelings.

We already know that we are caring friends to others.
Our lesson this week concentrated on identifying our own feelings.  By starting to realize clues about how we are feeling will help us to manage how those feelings impact us, especially if they are not comfortable feelings.

Every day we should try to Anticipate when we need to check in with ourselves and how we are feeling.  That is, we need to anticipate before activities or situations happen that might cause us to have strong feelings.  Later, we should Reflect on how we are able to check in with how we are feeling.  After all, we know ourselves best!

Try to anticipate how you might feel if:

• You are going on a field trip to the Maritime Aquarium and the day will be quite different than usual!
• Read Where the Wild Things Are and wonder how the character feels.
• A movie might take a while to get to the Happy Ending.
• You go shopping and it is super loud and crowded.
• You celebrate a friend's birthday and you hope to pick a favorite Popsicle flavor...if there are any of your favorites left...

If you imagine some of the feelings you might experience, it might help you manage them well, so that we learn how to handle disappointment.as well as extreme excitement.