Back to School: Part 4 - Effective Strategies for Helping Students Reduce Anxiety

Helping students with anxiety is a topic I have researched, lived, and presented on extensively. I share most of my presentations in LiveBinders so if you want to see the PowerPoint from the ASCA webinar, my state conference presentation, or from the ASCA National conference on anxiety check them out on the Anxiety, Stress, and Worry tab livebinders.com/ The binder also has links to some good articles and resources about helping children reduce anxiety.

There are new resources being developed all time to help children manage anxiety. For individuals, I begin by assessing how big a concern anxiety is for them. I do this a variety of ways but one all the students seem to favor is selecting the stone that represents the amount of discomfort their worries are currently causing them daily. I have a small pebble, a 1-2 inch rock, and a 4-5 inch rock that I keep on my window sill and bring out. I say, "you could have a little anxiety and it fits in your pocket and you only notice it occasionally, a medium size rock in your pocket that you would notice every time you moved, and a heavy rock that would weigh down your backpack." Once I know how big a problem the child perceives their anxiety issues to be I start assessing their coping tools. What have they tried so far that works to reduce their anxiety when they are stressed? What did not work? If I do see a student for ongoing short term counseling we set a goal to reduce anxiety and quantify it (for K-1 to make it a pebble and for grades 2-5 to reduce it from a __ to below 5 on a 10 point scale). I have found that students who are highly perfectionist or compulsive do not like groups and will only agree to individual support.

If possible I try to have most students with anxiety issues participate in small group counseling. It has many advantages and students  help one another as much as I help them. For groups, especially in grade 2 my students love worrywoos The books in this series are great and the website offers some good materials to create activities.I have done a whole group based on the worrywoos.  For more resources check out my pinterest/worry--anxiety-stress board. Some of my favorite picture books on anxiety are: Hey Warrior, Caterpillar's Wings, The Huge Bag of Worries, and The Worry Glasses. I generally teach a strategy each session and provide members opportunities to practice (calming exercises, deep breathing, mindfulness, etc.)

Stress is so pervasive in my school I teach a class lesson on techniques to reduce stress in grades 3-5. I think this further helps normalize anxiety issues and gives all students a few tools to self-regulate when experiencing normal stress. Since we use Second Step I use their lessons in the classroom.