Activity One: Sharing Feelings Playing “Emotion Charades”
Emotions Chart
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
Overview
This is a template for an inquiry project in a senior level early childhood course.
Introduction
The purpose of this inquiry project aims to give insight into the importance of acknowledging and encouraging the expression, identification, and regulation of students' emotions or feelings through conversation in the classroom. While learning in the classroom is taking place, opportunities, even small ones, will be made present for activities involving emotional and social learning.
The following are some of those activities:
1. Emotional Charades
2. Emotions Chart
3. The Skittles Feeling Game
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is defined by CASEL, or the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, as "an integral part of education and human development. ... It is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.
SEL also advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation." (CASEL, Fundamentals of SEL, 2022)
The framework for Social and Emotional Learning focuses on five broad categories that encompass the integration of all five aspects into every area and subject of academic learning. These categories include Identity and Agency, Emotional Regulation, Cognitive Regulation, Social Skills, and Public Spirit. (Frey et al., All learning is social and emotional, Chapter 1, pg. 15, 2019)
Resources:
AbbyThePup. (2021, January 25). Emotions. Self-published image, Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emotions_(Abby_the_Pup).jpg
CASEL. (2022, March 11). Fundamentals of SEL. CASEL. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/
Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Smith, D. (2019). In All learning is social and emotional: Helping students develop essential skills for the classroom and beyond (Chapter 1, p. 15). Textbook, ASCD.
Activity 1
The name of this activity is Emotional Charades. It is an activity that promotes emotional development.
In this game, we are going to build on students' skills in expressing and identifying emotions. The class will need to be split up into two teams. Before you begin, you need to make sure the students know how to play.
The teacher must first explain what 'Charades' means.
Charades - a game that involves acting without talking.
Before the activity starts, the teacher can run a ‘practice’ or 'test' round where educators show or demonstrate to the students what is expected of them.
Activity:
In this activity, the teacher will point at an emotion on the emotions chart provided above after selecting a student from one of the teams to stand in front of the class. The selected student will walk around the class and act out the emotion without talking or touching anyone. If their team thinks they know the emotion, they can put up a thumbs up and take a guess. The two teams will continue to take turns in choosing students to express their feelings until everyone has participated to their abilities. By the end of the game, the teacher will have the points tallied and know who won.
Extension: This game or activity can be played multiple times as the year progresses and as students' social-emotional development and social competence increases. Over time, as students demonstrate understanding and developmental progress, additional cards can be included that depict new vocabulary associated with new emotions.
A few examples could include adding the words jealous, thrilled, startled, distaste, intrigued, and
Why is this important?:
This allows students to practice expressing different forms of emotion, which can promote students' positive development of self-awareness, self-esteem, self-concept.
Charades allow the other students to work on identifying the emotion of other peers in the classroom.
This activity shows the students that a classroom is a safe place for expressing their own emotions.
Activity 2
The name for this activity is the Emotions Chart. This is an activity that focuses on and fosters emotional identification.
The following video goes over ten different emotions.
10 things your Emotions are trying to tell you video:
The video also talks about the feelings and actions associated with different emotions. This is a great video to get your students thinking about emotions and can help them identify their own, as well as those of others. The video aids students to communicate their feelings effectively and clearly, in order to be the best they can be. The video talks about core memories and how they are attached to emotions. It helps students understand why they or others around them may act the way they do. It’s crucial for students to understand their own personal emotional awareness to interpret their needs and wants, all to help them thrive socially as well as academically.
By granting your students the opportunity to fill out an emotions chart daily not only helps you as an educator to understand your students' feelings but also helps the students themselves gain an understanding of how they’re feeling. The following chart aids students in understanding, identifying, and communicating how their emotions.
"Emotions Chart" by Morgan Luebke is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
The chart also gives students insight into how their other classmates are feeling and helps them understand why others act the way they do that particular day. The emotional chart can be used daily and even at home as well. The chart assists in developing emotional awareness in children.
Activity 3
The final activity is The Skittles Feeling game. This is an activity focusing on emotional and social sharing.
This activity would be good for students in the 2nd-5th grade areas as instruction wouldn’t need to be reminded and clarified much for the most part.
After lunchtime would be an opportune time to play this game. Stopping or pausing instruction to allow 15 minutes for this activity.
Each table will have a copy of the skittles feeling game chart instructions.
Each student will receive a small cup with approximately 8-10 skittles in it, for 10 minutes, students will go around in a circle at their table pulling skittles and sharing one thing that correlates to each skittle color pulled out from their individual cup.
While everyone is discussing at their tables, students will be allowed to eat the skittles that were in their cups previously.
At the end of the activity, we will have a class discussion of how they felt the activity went and if they think they benefited from the activity.
Resources
Stocks, W. (2017, July 7). The emotions candy game. Hope 4 Hurting Kids. Retrieved from https://hope4hurtingkids.com/emotions/understanding-emotions/emotions-candy-game/
Benefits of Social-Emotional Learning and How It Applies to the Teacher
These activities provided beforehand showcase examples of how Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) can or could be used within or accompanying content areas of the curriculum to promote and foster the development of students' social competence and emotional intelligence.
Fun Fact: A meta-analysis that viewed over 213 studies involving more than 270,000 students discovered that SEL interventions and implementation of the five core competencies that make up the framework of Social-Emotional Learning in schools increased students' academic learning by 11 percentile points compared to those who didn't participate. (CASEL, What Does The Research Say, Benefits of SEL, 2022)
However, as mentioned in the introduction, there will be small and surprising moments unrelated to critical instruction where teachers can discover opportunities to aid students in developing their emotional awareness, identifying those feelings, and providing ways of being able to regulate emotions for student success in everyday functioning and academic learning.
Examples of Small Interactions and Strategies to Promote Social-Emotional Learning in The Classroom:
- Model persistence during challenging tasks, explaining that unsuccessful attempts to do
something are not failures but simply steps toward learning what will work. - Play games with rules periodically to help children learn to focus their attention and
regulate their impulses to achieve a goal. - Reinforce children’s good choices and link their actions to positive outcomes.
- Establish developmentally and culturally appropriate expectations for children’s
behavior, especially expectations for self-control and self-regulation. - Acknowledge and express appreciation for children’s empathic responses.
- Provide specific feedback to children about their efforts, reinforcing their choices that
support learning and linking their actions to outcomes. - Coach and guide children’s behavior by using positive, respectful phrasing and tone to
prompt problem-solving and to give brief instructions and reminders.
These and more examples can be found in the OER textbook, Introduction to Curriculum for Early Childhood Education, by Jennifer Paris, Kristin Beeve, and Clint Springer in chapter 7 on pg. 149 and 150.
With the information we have learned and discovered so far about Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), we must always keep in mind that as educators working with young developing children, students will need repetition, coaching, alternatives, and reminders for memory formation and understanding to occur.
This applies to classroom teachers because it demonstrates and showcases the power and abilities, we hold that can influence students' decision-making, problem-solving skills, conflict resolution, memory formation, feelings toward academic learning and school, perception of themselves, and social relationships with peers and others. The activities we choose, the environment we cultivate, physically and relationship-related, how we model behavior, and how we interact with students can come together to create a classroom that fosters the development of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).
Image Created by Giulia Forsythe.
Eighty percent of educators from across 15 countries believe positive emotions are critical for academic success, and emotional well-being is crucial for developing foundational literacies and communication skills. (CASEL, What Does The Research Say, Benefits of SEL, 2022)
Resources:
CASEL. (2022, May 26). What Does The Research Say? CASEL. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from http://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-does-the-research-say/
Forsythe, Giulia. (2022, June 13). Social Emotional Learning Diagram. Retrieved February 17, 2023, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Emotional_Learning_Diagram.jpeg
Johnson, A., Paris, J., Beeve, K., Springer, C., & Johnson, A. (2019). Introduction to curriculum for early childhood education (1.1 ed., Chapter 7, pp. 149–150)., OER College of the Canyons. Retrieved February 17, 2023, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CG-nXzs4xzTMBl32HbYcdtbRhiW1Z1YD/view
Conclusion
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) takes root in the heart of the classroom by providing the foundation for how the classroom environment can flourish, even if it is sometimes subtle and not always noticed. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) being implemented and used to its fullest potential within the classroom gives opportunities for educators and students to strengthen, repair, or create relationships not just in school but outside of it as well.
By allowing students to openly express and converse their emotions in the classrooms, the school community will become more of an open space and allow for great teamwork and relationships between students and the teacher.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
- Maya Angelou
Resources:
Smith, Mathew. John. (March 9, 2019). Maya Angelou. Baltimore M.D. Hopkins Hospital, Retrieved February 17, 2023, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maya_Angelou_(47327455761).jpg