For our last lesson, students had the opportunity to create a career plan, reflect on the school year with a handout, or engage in a discussion group with reflection questions about their 3rd grade year!

3rd graders learned to use their "N Voice" this week. This means speaking in a nice, neutral, and normal tone.

This week, we reviewed empathy, which is understanding how someone else feels. We read the book "The Invisible Boy" by Trudy Ludwig to discuss the impact of making our classmates feel "seen." We played a jeopardy style game show to reinforce and practice these concepts.

In 3rd grade, we learned the importance of not spreading gossip. It can hurt people's feelings and reputations. It is also a lot harder to undo than it is to start!

We have been learning about the brain and how the different parts talk to each other by sending messages on pathways. These pathways are called networks. We have strong networks for the things that are familiar to us and new networks for things that are still new to us. We can make a network stronger with practice!

This week, we are talking about happiness levels and the emotional vocabulary we can use to describe those feelings.

This week, we talked about taking a break. Sometimes, our brains feel too overwhelmed or angry, and we need to take a break. This means stopping what we are doing, using a calming skill, and resetting our brain to return to what we were doing. We talked about several skills to use when taking a break like, deep breathing, taking a walk, or art.

This week, we are discussing the different levels of anger. We can identify these as level 1: annoyed, level 2: angry, and level 3: furious. Please encourage your child to use these words to enhance their emotional vocabularies!

This week we learned that test anxiety is what we call the intense worry we feel about a test.  We also learned a few ways to cope with test anxiety. We made book marks to remind us of these helpful tips.

This week we learned that the reason that we all have emotions is because they tell us important information. For example, if you are sad about something it means you care about it. If you are afraid of something, you believe it is dangerous!

This week we will review the zones of regulation. This is language that we use at NES that categorizes our feelings and energy level into the Blue Zone, Green Zone, Yellow Zone, and Red Zone. We will also talk about some things that we can do to support ourselves during different zones.

This week was our first lesson, so we reviewed class expectations and learned to do a feelings check-in.  At the beginning of each class, students will be asked to identify their feelings by shading in an emoji.