We hope you’re having a terrific spring. Today’s activity and Experience Sheet are from a book about three formidable feelings, grief, fear and anger.
The Reality
Children cannot be protected from them and they can’t be immunized against them. At various points in their young lives, they will suffer the loss of goals, hopes, dreams, friendships, pets and people. They will fear failure, abandonment, punishment, rejection and countless real and imaginary threats to their safety and security. And there will be no ducking their wrath. They will spend countless hours reacting in anger to siblings, peers, authority figures and themselves.
Grades 3-8
Grief, fear and anger are significant emotions, so weighty in fact that they often drive children to think irrational thoughts and engage in unreasonable behaviors. Such responses left unchecked can easily spiral into destructive actions. If we want children to succeed in life, we must equip them with the tools to manage these intense feelings. Grief, fear and anger are annoyingly persistent companions, popping up regularly throughout life.
Taking a Step in the Right Direction
This week’s activity comes from the book Helping Kids Manage Grief, Fear and Anger. The activities, discussions, role plays, simulations and worksheets presented in this book are designed to help children explore, understand and express their feelings in safe and acceptable ways.Easy-to-understand explanations coupled with skill practice promote healthy responses to intense and sometimes overwhelming emotions.Children become more centered and focused, communicate more effectively, and demonstrate greater interdependence and understanding.
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Kids make choices every hour of every day — what to read, what to wear, where to sit, what to say. The majority of their choices are routine, the bulk of those relatively inconsequential. It’s not very important what TV show Nancy watches, who Joseph invites to the party, or which hill Mario flies down on his skateboard — or is it? While nothing can guarantee a student’s safety, one thing is certain: When a student makes wise choices, risky behavior is automatically reduced. The instinct for self-preservation is a powerful force, but so are the advertising, peer pressure and promises of instant gratification that lure us to eat junk foods, fill our lungs with killer chemicals and take foolish risks in pursuit of quick thrills. Students who have not been given guided practice in choice-making from an early age (“Do you want apples or a pears?” “If you choose to play soccer on Saturdays, what will you have to give up?”) are more apt to choose out of habit or whim than out of any systematic consideration of alternatives and their potential consequences. The more complex or problematic the issue, the more critical a student”s ability to activate a logical, informed approach to decision making. Without this ability, the student will have little choice but to fall back on old habits, or fall in with the crowd.
Grades 5-9
Factors That Influence Choice-Making Perhaps the simplest form of choice is between “yes” and “no,” between doing something and not doing it. But when you think about the potentially life-changing questions that can be answered with yes or no, it no longer seems so simple. Whether a student says yes or no to drugs, for example, involves a great many variables, among them:
Self-esteem.
Role models.
Values.
Emotional intelligence.
Sense of efficacy.
Accountability.
Information.
Ability to Apply a Decision-Making Process.
Support system.
This week’s activity comes from the book Helping Kids Make Wise Choices and Reduce Risky Behavior. As the title implies, this book has two purposes. One is to help students learn to make wise choices. The other is to reduce risky behavior. While making wise choices automatically reduces risky behavior, several risks commonly associated with growing up in our society deserve focused consideration. For this reason, specific activities in this book are devoted to providing information about the dangers of smoking and the safe use of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. Others teach students how to respond in potentially dangerous or emergency situations and how to resist peer pressure through assertive communication and well-rehearsed refusal skills. Many of the factors that influence choice making are also addressed in this book. Activities build self-esteem, promote healthy lifestyle choices, introduce stress management strategies, teach decision-making and problem-solving skills, deal candidly with anger management, and encourage the use of positive role models and friendships along with broad support systems.
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Recognizing the Importance of Emotions and Feelings
Try this little exercise. On a blank sheet of paper draw a line down the center. Label the left side Feelings, and the right side Actions. On the left side, write a list of as many of the feelings you can remember that you’ve had today. Leave a few spaces between the words. You may think of a feeling you had in traffic getting to school, or a response to a student, etc. Take only a minute to write this list of feeling words.
Now move to the action side. Pick out one positive feeling you wrote, and opposite it in the action column, write what you remember you did in response to that feeling. You may have laughed, said thanks, etc.
Next, pick one feeling that was not pleasant and write down what you did.
Now, pick out the feeling that made you most uncomfortable and write down what you did.
Grades K-12
Can you see how absolutely our actions are connected to our feelings? We all respond to our feelings, not in the exact same way, but we all do respond. Our feelings flow from our emotions. All people have the same emotions. Things like love, hate, fear, etc. The feelings people have as they experience these emotions can vary as can their behaviors in response to these feelings. Emotions generate our feelings, and our feelings are messages that tell us that we are experiencing an emotional event. It is what we do in response to these feeling messages that is a measure of our emotional intelligence.
The Impact of Emotional Intelligence
Because of their connection to behavior, emotions impact every area of life: health, learning, achievement, and relationships.
Managing feelings well and recognizing and responding effectively to the feelings of others enables students to lead happy and productive lives and to master habits of mind that contribute to personal and career success. We all, parents and educators, must nurture emotional intelligence in the same caring way we nurture IQ.
Think for a minute about the implications of this to what students need to learn – to what we need to teach. What a gift we give to students when we help them learn to channel their feelings into positive behaviors and developing self control.
Here Are Your Sharing Circle Lessons
Today’s Sharing Circle topics come from the K- 12 book, Guided Discussions for Developing Emotional Intelligence. Sharing Circles are a superb tool for helping students to identify, understand, and manage their feelings, and this book has over 100 Sharing Circle lessons. The topics are, Someone Who Respects My Feelings and A Time I Handled My Feelings Well.
Here’s Your Monday Morning Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
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• Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources
• Free Activities
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Conflict, violence, and bullying are escalating in schools nationwide. Educators today express unprecedented concern about school and classroom disruptions that steal instructional hours and endanger the safety of students.
Grades 8-12
Some amount of conflict occurs normally in all schools. However, schools that are large, have limited resources, or serve highly diverse populations often experience pervasive conflict. Outside the school, a corresponding escalation in aggressive and violent behaviors exists in society at large. Our culture inadvertently supports violence through advertising, social relationships, politics, the media, and entertainment.
Keeping the Lid On Conflict
Often, conflicts escalate because students and the adults around them don’t know how to respond to disagreements and confrontations pro-socially and creatively. Peers — sometimes even parents —reward aggressive responses to conflict. These responses are modeled on television and in movies, where even the “good guys” maim and kill in order to “win.” Obviously, our society and our schools are in critical need of people with effective pro-social conflict resolution skills.
This week’s lesson focuses on how to bring a more positive , pro-social aspect to conflict.It has been taken from Conflict Resolution Skills for Teens, a learning guide for middle and high school.
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Having looked at cooperation and support as qualities of friendship in our last blog, let’s take a deeper look at cooperation and its impact on kids learning to work together.
Grades K-8
In A Perfect World
Ideally, cooperation is characterized by interdependence and inclusion. Everyone is valued for his or her uniqueness. They trust one another, turn to each other for help and advice and, when they experience conflict, utilize positive methods to resolve it. This Sharing Circle promotes cooperation and team building, children acquire many of the insights and skills necessary to interact effectively with their peers, to handle conflict, and to participate productively in collaborative projects and school assignments.
Your Sharing Circle
This Sharing Circle comes from Teaching The Skills of Conflict Resolution, our resource guide of activities and strategies for kids in grades K-8. The topic is, We Cooperated to Get It Done.
Here’s Your Monday Morning Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
Do you want more information?
• Leading a Sharing Circle
• Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources
• Free Activities
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Active listening is a wonderful process for helping your students work through upsets to discover exactly what their feelings are.
When we listen actively to our students, two things happen at once. First, negative feelings lessen or disappear after they are expressed and acknowledged in a supportive, nonjudgmental manner, and second, we are modeling and thus teaching students the skill itself.
Active listening helps develop problem-solving skills. As you model and teach active listening, your students begin acquiring the skill, and they become increasingly able to talk through or articulate a problem clearly as opposed to having it just spinning in their heads because they are unable to express it. Through discussion, they are better able to work toward a solution. Active listening also facilitates the growth of a student’s ability to express himself or herself effectively.
A Tool for Today
Today’s lesson teaches the skills of Active Listening and applies them directly to lessening anger. It has been taken from Anger Control And Conflict Management, a learning guide for the elementary grades.
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Students are often confronted with situations in their lives that produce hurt, anger, fear, grief, anxiety, and confusion.
Here Is A Great Resource for You
Here’s an activity that is an effective group counseling session as well as a solid classroom experience designed to harness the power of eclectic grouping by bringing students together, not only to be heard, but also to provide a support system for each other in the midst of their own hurting and healing. It is based on the premise that acknowledging hurt is one critical step in the process of healing. Developing compassion, forgiveness and moving beyond pain are other critical steps that can be facilitated in the context of group dynamics.
In this activity we are helping the students discover the power of thought and how it can help in their healing process.
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Today’s blog was inspired when I was sharing a meal the other day with a teacher friend. I asked how the new school year was starting out, and she shared that a challenge was getting the students to be kind to one another. I thought that providing a kindness activity today seemed the perfect response.
Kindness and Its Importance
Everyone intuitively knows the value of being kind, and teaching kindness and empathy to children. Observing or participating in acts of kindness sets a positive and caring tone for the day as well as reinforces important social-emotional skills. Modeling and reinforcing kindness makes it a practical and commonplace skill.
Many benefits have been reported in support of directly teaching kindness in schools including: Happy caring children; Greater sense of belonging and improved self-esteem; Improved health and less stress; increased feelings of gratitude; Better concentration; Reduced depression; Less bullying. In a 2016 report the US Department of Education said that research demonstrates the importance of kindness: “Students learn best when they feel safe, supported, challenged and accepted”. These are all elements of kindess.
Here’s Your Kindness Resource
This week’s activity helps students learn about the richness found in kind acts and behaviors and how they can be a benefit to all aspects of their lives. The activity, A Book of Kindness, comes from the resource guide, Caring and Capable Kids.
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It has been said that life is forty percent what we make it, and sixty percent how we take it. Whatever the ratio, the point is clear that attitude is a defining lens. We always have a choice about how we respond to events in our lives.
To recognize the benefits of developing positive, responsible attitudes, young people must first grow in self-awareness. They must learn to understand feelings and their relationship to thoughts, and they must understand that their own feelings are normal, predicable, and susceptible to control. Feelings convey messages about conditions and events going on in the environment, and provide important clues to the way the brain is processing information.
As William James said over one hundred years ago, “Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
A Tool You Can Use
This week’s activity helps students learn about the power of their attitudes – how negative attitudes cause problems and how positive attitudes can be a benefit to all aspects of their lives. The activity, Developing a Positive Attitude, has two parts – a group discussion followed by an experience sheet.
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Reflections on Respect Here’s a follow up on last week’s Blog which discussed the importance of teaching students the value of respect. Helping students understand the significance of a respectful attitude and helping them identify specific actions and behaviors that demonstrate respect is the purpose of today’s Sharing Circle. This Sharing Circle topic comes from the activity book (Grades 3-6), Hearts and Minds – An After-School Program for Developing Reading Literacy and Emotional Intelligence. The topic is, How I Show Respect Toward Others…
Here’s Your Monday Morning Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
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