Rocketship Rise 7

What does social emotional learning look like in your classroom? 

Within in our classroom, we play games (jeopardy, emotions matching game) read books/listen to stories that may not be listed in our curriculum, make sure we are intentional with teaching lessons around emotions during small groups, and giving time for our students to be able to express how they feel, talk about it and explore ways to help them channel their emotions in a positive way. We have peer helpers (one of our classroom jobs) that help students when they are sad, get to calm down and help with picking activities they can do to help calm down (reading a book, making a picture, talking with a puppet, etc). This person in some cases, helps the other students calm down a lot faster than with teacher support because they are using things that they would like to use to calm down. Throughout our day, we CONSISTENTLY do turn and talks during whole group instruction. 

Can you speak to the value that SEL has in your classroom?  Why is it important to you? 

SEL has been of such huge value in our classroom. Talking out our own emotions with our students as well as them talking to us about their feelings has been the highlight of it all. Our students are able to see how we as adults handle our emotions and therefore can learn good strategies they can use as well. We have also noticed that being able to teach children how to self-regulate their feelings, being able to have their own voice, and being able to be aware of the feelings of others has helped take a lot of the load off of us as teachers and brings in a layer of student autonomy.  

What does your teaching team do to ensure all kids are growing their social emotional skills?

As a teaching team we always make sure to tag team with students so that they know that each teacher cares and is there to help. Another thing we do is make sure students know that their feelings are valid by identifying their feelings and talking out ways that we can help them navigate through those feelings. We also make sure to model the behavior we want to see within the classroom with each other as teachers (i.e. showing students how to share and take turns, showing how to have conversations with each other-mostly through turn and talks, and making sure to show how confident we are in our abilities throughout the classroom). One important thing we always do is celebrate our students when they show off any of the Social Emotional skills that we have been working on within our classroom (by giving out bee bucks, gain a star as a class, stickers, hugs, high fives or fist bumps)! 

What advice do you have for teaching teams who want to improve their SEL practices?

• Please make sure the SEL practices that you want to use in your are done starting on day 1! Once you get a routine in place that students can follow diligently, it will cause a nice flow that will be seen throughout your daily schedule even when visitors are in the room. It will also keep order within the classroom with your students.