What I’ve found as a teacher is the less you explicitly teach social emotional learning, the less you teach anything else. What I mean by this is that kids inherently will have problems and many of them will need help developing tools and coping skills for those. Explicitly teaching students how to show respect and kindness, how to react when they don’t get their way, etc. will reduce the amount of times your math lesson gets interrupted because they just have to hash out what happened at recess 10 minutes ago. When teachers say “I don’t have time to teach SEL” I say, “you don’t have time not to”

The good news is that these topics can be very fun and exciting to teach! My favorite way to teach social emotional learning skills is through art and cute craftivities!

For example, in February - a month that’s all about love - I teach students about self love and positive self talk. We create a list of positive things we love about ourselves and turn them into affirmations. I talk to my students about the importance of using nice words not only towards others but also to ourselves. When we mess up and say or think something unkind about ourselves, that is like saying mean words to someone else. Instead, we can focus on the positive thinking and say something like “I am trying my best” or “I never give up.”

As a bonus, it is a really adorable craft to create on Valentine’s Day, and I love displaying the students’ positive affirmations!

Another SEL lesson that I love is teaching about gratitude in March. Personally, I try to make a habit of starting each day with a list of gratitude. Studies show that focusing on gratitude shifts our mindset and can improve our moods drastically. After we discuss the importance of gratitude, my students brainstorm a list of things that make them feel really lucky, and we make our “Bowl of Lucky Charms”.

The perfect thing about this activity (and all the others I’ve created like this) is that it is adaptable for any age. I’ve used all these activities with my 6th graders as well as our kindergarten buddies. The lucky charms activity, for example, has sentence stems and pictures for the younger grades. And if you teach upper elementary (or even middle or high school), your students will LOVE doing this type of activity too (although they might not say it, I promise they really do). How often do the big kids get to color and express their feelings in school? Sadly, that’s something that starts to go away as the curriculum gets more challenging, but one thing I’ve seen from using these activities for the last 4 years with 6th graders is that they are grateful for an opportunity to just be kids and color. And they are the ones who often need the SEL skills and strategies the most!
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I use lessons and craftivities like this all throughout the year with my class! You can grab the seasonal bundle here, which gives you a discount compared to buying each activity individually. You’ll also find fun activities for back to school, state testing season (can also be used as general goal setting), self care, and more!

Xoxo,

Lauren
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