Week of: October 11th and October 18th

To begin the social skills curriculum students discussed creating emotion wheels, so that the students would be able to demonstrate their ability to identify feelings and emotions. For some of the students, this was an activity they did a few years ago. We hoped that they would recognize that even though they are older, they may have different situations or things that make them feel different emotions. Each student wrote down specific things they connect to certain emotions on a day to day basis. The students spent the past few weeks identifying 7 emotions and sharing them with their peers and teachers. To finalize the emotion wheels, the teachers took photos of the students to go in the middle of their project.

Week of: November 8th

In social group this week the students discussed how they can categorize their feelings into four groups. Next, students who were new to social group this year, they were introduced to the Zones of Regulation and other students reviewed this concept.

Blue Zone:

• When your body is running slow such as when you are tired, sick, sad, or bored.

Green Zone:

• When your body is “good to go.” Your body may feel happy, calm, and focused.

Yellow Zone:

• When your body is starting to lose control. You may feel frustrated, overwhelmed, silly, wiggly, excited, worried, anxious, or surprised.
• It is a good idea to use caution when you are in the yellow zone.

Red Zone:

• You may feel terror, uncontrolled anger, aggression, and elation. Your body is out of control, You are having trouble making good decisions, and must STOP!

After the students engaged in a wonderful discussion about how it is okay to be in any zone, but we want to spend the majority of our time in the green zone. A question came up about if you can be in two zones at once and we talked about how on the outside you might display one zone, but on the inside, you might feel that are you in a different zone. The students then brainstormed and shared strategies on how to let adults and peers know how they feel.

Strategies students came up with were:

• Tell the teacher or adult what you are feeling
• Take a break
• Think about something different
• Ask for help

Image Credit: Zones of Regulation

Students have been working on identifying expected and unexpected behaviors. An expected behavior is something that would be appropriate to see and an unexpected behavior is something that would be inappropriate. For example, listening, following directions, and showing respect are expected behaviors. Fooling around, using inappropriate language, and having an unsafe body are unexpected behaviors.

Students took this concept further to discuss how expected and unexpected behaviors affect their peers or others around them. If someone is following direction that would make us feel good, if someone was fooling around, that may make us feel not so good or weird.

We also discussed problems and their size. We can classify problems as big, medium, or little. Big problems usually take longer to solve and you'll need adult help, such as, a flood. Medium problems take a few days to solve and you can use an adult to help, such as, a conflict with a peer. Little problems take very little time to solve and can be done with no adult support, such as, your pen falls on the floor, or you forgot your homework at home.

We also spent some time discussing whole body listening. This is when your eyes are watching, your ears are listening, mouths are waiting to talk, and your belly buttons are facing the teacher. We practiced this and gave students scenarios of examples and non examples of whole body listening. We also talked about thinking with our eyes. Our eyes can do many observations of our surroundings and we can use them to help us figure out a situation or problem solve.