Stick Together
At the end of his famous essay “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” author Robert Fulghum writes, “And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.” Sticking together makes sense to adults who have the life experience to understand how necessary and valuable relationships are. For a young child, who is firmly planted at the center of her universe, the idea is brand new, which is why one of the first things an Ellis girl learns in the Lower School is that she is a part of a team. In small and big ways, we set the expectation that we are all in this together and we have a responsibility to one another. At the same time that we are establishing this expectation with our students, we also acknowledge that it takes time and effort to create a strong team because it relies on the strength of our relationships.
Building meaningful relationships is not something most children excel at. If you recall your own elementary school days, you might remember that at times the playground felt like a minefield and other children were enemy combatants to be avoided or confronted depending on the day. What makes social interactions so challenging for children is the difficulty they have interpreting the behavior of other children, communicating effectively, managing emotions, and controlling selfish impulses—all necessary skills for managing the complexities of social interactions. Over the last 100 years, experts in psychology and child development have examined children’s behavior and brains to provide us with answers as to why children are so egocentric. While scientific research is fascinating and helpful, the bottom line is that like many other things that children are just learning to do, getting along well with others requires learning and practicing a set of skills.
While it may seem illogical to bring together a group of children who are all equally ill-equipped to handle social situations and establish an expectation for teamwork and cooperation, low expectations do not give rise to change. We plan daily team meetings and weekly assemblies, create lessons, choose books to read aloud and games to play, all to encourage our students to share who they are, see their similarities and embrace their differences, listen to each other, and recognize that every individual is a valuable member of the team. We model prosocial behaviors, help students reflect on what they could have done differently when they upset a friend, and teach strategies for calming our bodies and getting back in the green zone when we are dysregulated, all to give students the tools they need to build relationships. We believe in our students’ capacity to grow in this area of their development in the same way we believe they can learn to become expert writers, mathematicians, scientists, and artists. We believe it because we see it in all of our spaces as girls learn to connect across their differences, share, resolve conflict, and help each other.
When you meet an Ellis graduate, inevitably she will mention the friendships she developed in her years here. It is not by chance that Ellis students develop lifelong friendships; it results from all of the ways we teach our girls to stick together.
