Hannah Beach
Author, Educator, Play-Based Consultant, Emotional Health Consultant, and Keynote Speaker, Hannah Beach Consulting
Education, play-based learning, emotional health in schools, trauma-Informed, Neufeld, anxiety in children, aggression in children, relationships and development, relationships and play.
Media
Getting Unstuck #172: Why Do Our Children Need Time for Self-initiated Free Play?
Getting Unstuck: Educators Leading Change Podcast, June 28, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://hannahbeach.ca/getting-unstuck-podcast-free-play-hannah-beach/
Why this conversation matters
“As a culture, we’ve replaced play with entertainment. Kids used to have this “outbreath,” whether it was playing the guitar or playing hockey on the street or building forts or whatever it was. Kids no longer have this place to digest their inner world. Instead, they are saturated, full - and not in a good way. There are no empty spaces in their lives for play to even take root. They are attached to screens or in programming 24 /7. None of those things are bad in themselves, but when you add them all up together, they remove all the “void” moments in which kids would fall into play. And this loss has dire consequences both on their individual emotional health as well as that of learning communities.”
— HANNAH BEACH
Getting Unstuck: Educators Leading Change Podcast, April 21, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://hannahbeach.ca/getting-unstuck-podcast-april-21-2020/
Tamara Strijack and I spoke with Kirsten Richert and Jeff Ikler about Reclaiming Our Students and the huge potential for every single person who cares about children’s learning to create deep, meaningful change through relationship.
Hannah Beach: Reclaiming Our Students
Better Leaders Better Schools, August 25, 2021Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.betterleadersbetterschools.com/066-hannah-beach/
Show Highlights
See the emotion behind every challenging behavior.
RECLAIMING our STUDENTS – book and interactive videos.
How to avoid influencing stuck roles or developing a negative identity.
Journaling tips that leave room for the ugly and gratitude to emerge.
Be in their eyes, call kids to who they are in the future.
Powerfully grow goodness by feeling the knowledge.
Teach the “oldest wisdom” to sense humanity.
Lead students to build capacity to see their own gifts, beauty and human connection.
Hannah Beach - Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever - And what We Can Do About It - ep.367
Teaching Learning Leading K12, April 14, 2021Radio/Podcast
Hannah Beach talks about her book co-authored with Tamara Neufeld Strijack - Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever - And What We Can Do About It. This is episode 367 of Teaching Learning Leading K12, an audio podcast.
Anxiety for Kids and Adults during Covid
Global News - The Sunday Night Health Show with Maureen McGrath, October 5, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://hannahbeach.ca/anxiety-for-kids-and-adults-during-covid-interview-october-5-2020/
Anxiety for Kids and Adults during Covid…
Kids are playing “coronavirus tag.” That’s okay.
Thrive GlobalOnline
URL: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/kids-are-playing-coronavirus-tag-thats-okay/
Games like "coronavirus tag" or "doll quarantine" are emerging spontaneously in households and communities and countries around the world. Don't panic. It's normal—and healthy—for kids to play out their fears and their anxiety.
Relationship, Rhythm, Release: Back To School Social-Emotional Basics
teachthought, August 25, 2020Online
URL: https://www.teachthought.com/technology/back-to-school-sel/
How we can create the conditions for emotional safety, which is the foundation for learning.
Authors say students need more emotional connections with guiding adults
Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever—And What We Can Do About It
by Hannah Beach & Tamara Neufeld Strijack
Page Two Books Inc.
April 14, 2020
978-1989603222
Children are more anxious, aggressive, and shut down than ever.
Faced with this epidemic of emotional health crises and behavioral problems, teachers are asking themselves what went wrong. More importantly: What can we do about it?
Reclaiming Our Students is a thoughtful, trauma-sensitive guide to restoring the student-teacher relationship and creating the conditions for change, written by Hannah Beach, celebrated educator and specialist in emotional health, and Tamara Neufeld Strijack, clinical counsellor and academic dean of the acclaimed Neufeld Institute—with a foreword by Gordon Neufeld, PhD. Reclaiming Our Students empowers teachers with relationship-based strategies to create emotional safety, discovery, and change in the classroom.
You’ll learn:
How to build, feed, and protect the student-teacher relationship
Why children are anxious or bossy, aggressive or checked out, and what teachers can do to address these behavioral issues at their root
How you can help students and classes shift their identity as the “problem student” or “bad class"
Experiential activities for students of all ages that preserve and restore emotional health and well-being
Plus, you’ll find special considerations and information for parents, principals, counsellors, and home educators for building safety and support in the learning environment.
Combining Hannah’s groundbreaking experiential approach to creating emotional health and community in the classroom with the Neufeld Institute’s insightful approach to building relationships and making sense of children, Reclaiming Our Students is required reading for teachers that not only want to understand and overcome daily challenges, but also re-connect to their calling as educators.
I Can Dance | Je Peux Danser Series
by Hannah Beach
Rubicon Publishing
October 1, 2016
978-1-4869-0198-2
Written with all teachers and all children in mind, regardless of ability, the award-winning and best-selling I Can Dance series has been adopted by English and French language school boards across Canada, as well as thousands of individual teachers and schools.
The books support educators and helping professionals to build social and emotional health in learning communities of all kinds. Teachers use these books everyday to foster self-expression, inclusion and community-building in their classrooms.
Primarily designed for students in Kindergarten to Grade 6, each of the six books in this series is accompanied by a CD that contains rousing music, as well as guided audio facilitation (English version by Hannah) to assist educators of all backgrounds – even those with no dance experience! – to bring dance and creative movement to their classrooms.
The books are incredibly easy to use: simply read the book out loud to your students, and then play the accompanying CD to get dancing! You can choose the tracks with voice-over facilitation to guide your students through the activities, or choose the music-only tracks if you wish to guide your students directly.
Biography
Hannah Beach is an award-winning educator, author, emotional health consultant, and keynote speaker. She is the co-author of the best-selling book Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut-Down than Ever—and What We Can Do About It, with Tamara Neufeld Strijack, a trauma-informed resource for teachers and parents rooted in the relationship-based approach, now being translated into multiple languages internationally (including French, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian and Korean) and has been adopted by school boards across Canada. She was recognized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 as one of five featured changemakers in Canada. Her bestselling I Can Dance book series, supporting the emotional health of children through movement, play, and expression, won a 2017 Gold International Moonbeam Children’s Book Award. Beach delivers professional development services across the country, provides emotional health consulting to schools, and speaks at conferences about the power of bringing more feeling and human connection into the classroom.
Beach is an emotional health and play-based learning consultant for Britannica Education, where she develops courses which are facilitated by the Britannica Education team across the globe.