My Mouth is a Volcano

Although we may initially think that children are being rude when they interrupt, they actually just don't know any better.  Developmentally, young children are just starting to figure out that there is more going on in life than themselves.  Because of their egocentric thinking, children just blurt out what pops into their mind without a further thought.

In kindergarten we read "My Mouth is a Volcano" by Julia Cook.  She uses a volcano erupting as a reference to our voices interrupting.  We meet Louis who has lots of exciting things to share throughout the day, but ends up in time out over and over because of his constant "erupting."  Through a cute rhyme, we can picture Louis' words building up steam before they "erupt" out of his mouth at the wrong times.  Once Louis is interrupted by his fellow classmates, he is confronted with how other people feel when he does the same, and is able to develop empathy.

After the story, we reviewed ways to help us not "erupt" and brainstormed some of the way we already us successfully.  Ideas included: wait our turn, raise our hand, take a deep breath, gulp down our words, bite down hard so our words don't escape, breathe out our words then suck them back in at the right time, etc.  Students wrote out their plan to prevent interrupting and enjoyed making their volcanoes erupt on their paper.