For Rania Melki, a preschool teacher at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School, anytime is a good time to teach children respect for each other - even high-five Fridays.
"Something happened, and I don't feel good about it," the teacher gently told her class of 5-year-olds as they sat in a circle Friday morning. The children, who had just finished giving their classmates high-fives in honor of the fifth and final day of the school week, looked around their cozy Cambridge classroom for the wounded soul.
It didn't take long for them to notice the pout on the face of one little girl with long blond hair who did not get a high-five from anyone.
Moments earlier, Melki had watched quietly as the little girl tried twice to get her friend to give her the sign. But the friend turned to her and gruffly said she was going to five one to another classmate instead.
Now it was time for the teacher, whom students call by her first name, to speak up. Melkie had everyone hold hands in a circle and then asked the girl who had rebuffed her friend to sit just outside of that circle. "How do you think she feels," the teacher inquired of her 13 pupils.
"Excluded and bad," blurted out a sympathetic girl with curly brown hair.
"That's right," Melki said. "And we have to be careful not to do anything that will make someone feel that way. Come on back in the circle now."
It was a simple gesture but one that Melki hopes taught the class an important lesson about how to treat people and one that fit in perfectly with the school's Responsive Classroom program.
The program was adopted five years ago to try to make students feel important and give them a sense of belonging.
"Maybe you could have told your friend that you were going to high-five someone else first and then her," Melki said with a smile and a look that said, "What do you think?"
"Yeah, that would have been better," the little girl admitted.
"Empathy is something you need to foster in kids, and the more experience they get in it, the better they become at it," said Melki, who has been teaching for five years.
The lessons, it seems, are catching on.
