With schools closed due to Covid-19, social emotional learning instruction can sometimes get pushed to the back-burner. In reality, it’s now more than ever that students need a focus on emotions, managing worry and anxiety, and positive social connections. Here are 3 simple ways you can incorporate social emotional learning into your distance learning schedule.
Incorporate daily check-ins into your distance learning schedule.
Check in with your students each day to see how they are feeling. This can be as simple as sending an email! It is important that we let students know that we care about how they are feeling right now and that it is okay to feel some uncomfortable or confusing emotions. Even though we have moved to distance learning, we can still be readily available to support our students.
These daily check ins are a great way to check in on emotions and also provide students with some practice and reinforcement of a variety of social emotional learning skills. You can have students complete it virtually (via Google Slides OR PowerPoint) or through a printable PDF.
See DIGITAL version –> click here
See PRINTABLE version –> click here
Use SEL warm-ups as part of your distance learning day.
Warm-ups are short 5-10 minute activities to get students thinking about a certain subject or topic. For social emotional learning, a warm-up can include a role play, a sort of different emotions or behaviors, journaling, and more. You can easily adapt these exercises for distance learning.
One of my favorite SEL Warm-Ups that is easily adapted for distance learning is an activity called “I Notice, I Wonder, I Feel…” In this activity, students look at a photograph and respond with what they notice about it, what the photograph makes them wonder, and how the photograph makes them feel. I have created some for you to try for free using Google Forms. Check them out here!
Teach daily social emotional learning mini lessons.
Research says that social emotional learning skills should be taught explicitly and intentionally. That means that integrating SEL into other subject areas is great, but to be most effective you should teach SEL skills on their own as well. This can still happen during distance learning!
Choose one skill each day and teach a mini lesson on that topic. Read alouds and YouTube videos can be great companions to these lessons.
Take a look at the list below for ideas of topics to teach in daily lessons:
- Kindness
- Friendship
- Bullying
- Goal setting
- Growth mindset
- Respect
- Taking responsibility for actions
- Empathy
- Peer pressure
- Conflict resolution
- Breathing strategies
- Identifying emotions
- Apologizing
- Forgiveness
- Character traits
- Fears
- Anxiety
- Appreciating diversity
- Anger management
- Expressing emotions
Check out the products listed in this post:
Comment below and let me know how you are continuing to teach social emotional learning virtually!
2 Comments
Hi Peyton, quick question: Would your lesson resources align with the new Road Map for Life by Treela SEL songs that my students are really enjoying right now?
Hi Peyton,
Check out our SEL check-in tool. After reading this I thought you might be interested. I’d love for you to back link our activities page in future articles and would love to chat with you anytime!
https://rhithm.app/
-Josh