Self Awareness
Elementary
What is Self Awareness?
The ability to accurately recognize one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior. The ability to accurately assess one’s strengths and limitations, with a well-grounded sense of confidence, optimism, and a “growth mindset.”
Identifying emotions
Accurate self-perception
Recognizing strengths
Self-confidence
Self-efficacy
What are Feelings?
"Feelings are mental associations and reactions to an emotion. They are colored by our personal experiences and beliefs. Emotions are involuntary bodily responses like when you’re when you go to school and come to know there is a surprise test. Your pulse increases and you feel uneasy in your stomach."
"Feelings make of you aware of your emotions. So, feelings arise out of the narrative we give to the emotion. So, one might wonder, why do we have these feelings?"
Watch the video to the right from MocomiKids to learn more.
Below are additional videos that explain feelings and emotions.
Finding Words to Tell Our Feelings
The Feelings Song
Storybots: Emotions
Name That Emotion
To teach self-awareness of one's emotions, children are encouraged to check-in throughout the day with their feelings.
The Zones of Regulation and Name Your Feeling are two strategies they can use to identify their emotions.
The Zones of Regulation
The Zones of Regulation is a tool that provides all students, teachers, and parents common language for communicating our emotional state. One helpful thing to remember is "no matter how we are feeling, it is okay to feel that way and feelings are okay, but what matters is how you cope and respond to that feeling". Here is the Zones of Regulation common language we can use:
When you are in the Blue Zone, your body is running slow, such as when you are tired, sick, sad or bored.
The Green Zone, like a green light, is when you are “good to go.” If you are in the Green Zone, you may feel happy, calm and focused.
When entering the Yellow Zone, proceed with caution and slow down! The Yellow Zone describes when you start to lose control such as when you are frustrated, overwhelmed, silly, wiggly, excited, worried, anxious or surprised. It is a good idea to use caution when you are in the Yellow Zone.
The Red Zone is reserved for extreme emotions such as terror, uncontrolled anger, aggression and elation. When you are in the Red Zone, you are out of control, have trouble making good decisions and must STOP.
The Zones of Regulation
Name Your Feeling
NAME
Notice how you are feeling. Pick a word (i.e. tired, angry, sad, frustrated), color, weather word, or emoji to describe how you are feeling!
CLAIM
Own your feeling. Reach out and share it with someone. You say, “I am feeling ___!” You can ask how others are feeling too.
REFRAME
After you claimed how you are feeling, you can begin taking active steps to reframe, if needed. Check out the strategies below!
Recognizing Feelings and Training Our Brains
Daily Check-In
1. How am I feeling today?
2. Who am I connecting with?
3. How am I moving my body?
4. What beauty am I recognizing or creating?
5. What am I grateful for?
6. Are my thoughts “cool thoughts?”
Cool Thoughts
We can train our brains to have more “cool thoughts” to help us find calmness by repeating statements like these to ourselves:
This is hard, but I can deal with it!
If I keep trying, I can reach my goal!
Think of your own cool self-talk statement you can use during this time!
