Emotion Explorers with the Turtles

The following post was written by Kether Langdon in Spring 2023. Kether is one of our amazing Educational Assistants at Churchill Alternative PS:

You may be asking yourself, “What is SEL?”. SEL stands for social emotional learning. These are the skills that our kids are learning everyday from one another, from their educators, and from us at home. Oftentimes, parents are most concerned with children learning the hard skills in the curriculum, like math and literacy. As an EA, I can tell you that the soft skills are as important, if not vital to learning. When kids are dysregulated, they cannot access learning. Our whole team at Churchill, from office to ECEs to teachers and EAs, is very aware of this connection.

This year I have been working in the grade ½ Turtle class with Rachael. We noticed that many of our students struggle with emotional regulation, stress, anxiety, and conflict resolution skills. This is totally normal at this age, but we feel like the earlier we work on concrete strategies for managing these struggles the more aware and strong our kids will be later. I developed a program that I have named Emotion Explorers that combines activities from a couple of different programs we use in our school board.

During the past few weeks we have learned about stress, our brains and fight, flight, freeze, relaxation breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and empathy (with others and ourselves). We’ve had wonderful, insightful conversations about what they know and feel. It is important that our children learn to identify their warning signs before they lose control. For this reason we learned “Flip our Lid”. The kids loved learning about how their brains work! 

The activity pictured above is called Umbalakiki. This activity involves a lovely story about sharing and leaving behind negative emotions. We then drew or wrote some feelings or experiences that the children wanted to leave with the tree. They were brave to share with our community the things that they are struggling with. 

I have been consistently impressed by the insight, empathy, and willingness to share that this group displays. We’ve worked hard on empathy for friends, but also empathy for ourselves.The kids will hopefully head home for the summer with tools to help them deal with whatever may come their way.

I have included a picture of some of the stories we’ve read and the Flip the lid handout.

Published: 2024