As students recover from the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to hear from teachers that they’re searching for social-emotional learning resources to support students. To help provide teachers like you with SEL resources, we brought our community of teachers together to share their tips and we’re sharing them with you!
We recently hosted a #SELChat on Twitter to facilitate conversation between teaching peers. During the chat, we received many helpful suggestions about how to integrate more social-emotional learning into your classroom.
We highlighted some of our favorite suggestions below to help you incorporate social-emotional learning into your lesson plan (additional tweets from the Twitter chat can be found here).
5 Ways To Add Social-Emotional Learning to Your Classroom
1. Make social-emotional learning silly with Shakespeare
The Bard has been many things, but an SEL resource is a new one! @michellelynh suggested using a feeling scale that resembles a “tag yourself” meme to give you a read of how your class is feeling (as a bonus, it will probably make your students laugh!).
2. Use tangible examples that younger students can understand
Social-emotional learning is often intangible, which can make it harder to understand and define, especially for younger students. Finding metaphors through physical objects can help younger students understand the effect they have on others.
3. Sometimes, you need to take care of their physical needs first.
If a student can’t focus on learning until their emotional needs are met, they can’t focus on their social-emotional needs until their physical needs are met. We love this extremely organized station for students to get exactly what they need.
4. Add some affirmations to your routine!
Affirmations can feel cheesy but when you find the right ones they can mean the world to your students.
5. Do some social-emotional learning focused crafts to brighten up your classroom.
Crafts are a great way to help your students express their emotions and take a “brain break” from academic learning.
And, of course, social-emotional learning is challenging without connection.
Bummed you missed out on our Twitter Chat?
If you missed our #SELChat, don’t worry! We host Twitter Chats on different topics semi-regularly. To make sure you receive news of our next Twitter Chat, make sure you’re registered with AdoptAClassroom.org.