Bathroom Visits

Young children need to visit the toilet regularly and teaching them to do this at a time that doesn’t impinge on their learning is essential.

I talk with the children about the 5 ‘good choice’ times to go to the toilet:

1. Before School
2. Fruit Snack break
3. Morning Recess
4. Lunch break
5. After school

Some regular phenomena in younger classes that amuse me are:

The Toilet Party

In schools where the toilets are separate to the classroom building, schools have a policy of sending children to the toilet in pairs. This impacts the learning time of the child who didn’t actually need to go in the first place. It also means that often the visit can take a lot longer than expected as children stop to chat, explore garden bugs along the way, spray water in the bathroom, or play with the toilet paper. Often the teacher needs to resort to sending another pair of children in the role of ‘police’ to hunt out the wayward students.

Where you are fortunate enough to have bathrooms within the building and can send children by themselves, this is much easier. Generally, I have a rule that only 1 boy and 1 girl can be at the toilet at any one time. This works well and avoids tardy returns.

The Toilet Disease

With young children, 4-6 year olds, a reminder of one student’s call of nature is enough to derail any class. There are times when one child raises their hand to go to the toilet and suddenly you have 6 other children raising their hand to do the same. At times like these, I have resorted to the whole class toilet visit. It eats into learning time, and often you have to re-teach the concept, but it is less painful in the long-run.

When Grade 1 students decide to choose their own adventure…

Jackie and Julia lined up at the end of recess and walked with the Music teacher to their lesson. On the way to the music room, the two girls decided to slip out of the class line and go to the toilet. No, they didn’t notify the teacher of their deviation. The girls arrived at Music 15 minutes after the start of the class. It became apparent that neither girl had actually done any toileting when 10 minutes later, Jackie asked the teacher if she could go to the toilet! 

Questions were raised after this incident: Why didn’t the music teacher notice that two students were missing?… the necessity of calling a roll, or at the very least, to count your students.

A day later, Jackie and Julia thought they would have another play in the bathroom and they once again slipped away from the line while walking to the classroom with their  teacher. The homeroom teacher noticed that they were missing and sent an aide to check the bathroom. 

This was a perfect opportunity for the class teacher to speak with both girls about the necessity of the teacher knowing where all the students are at all times. Students need to realise from early on that this is not a restriction, it is for their own safety. And teachers, we have a duty of care. We need to be ever-vigilant so that we are never found negligent in our care of the students in our charge.