Ideas for Increasing Interest & Engagement
Let's Improve Emotional Engagement in Classrooms!
Emotions for Kids: Lessons and Activities to Build Self-Awareness
Social-emotional learning is a key component in teaching young children. You’ll find that a good part of your day is spent educating your students about how to recognize, manage and express feelings.
Because of this, here are engaging ways to teach emotions for kids in your classroom.
- Proud to be Primary -
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10 Activities to Help Students Explore Emotions
Research shows that there is a strong relationship between social-emotional learning and cognitive development. But, just like math and reading, students must be taught social and emotional skills. Emotional regulation is a particularly important skill for students to learn as it affects students’ ability to make decisions, persist in goal-oriented activities, and seek help when needed.
Try a few of these fun activities to help your students learn how to explore and regulate their emotions.
- Apperson -
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How to Make Students Express Their Emotions
Social emotional learning is a key component in teaching young children. As a teacher, you’re likely to encounter students with a particular social emotional expression. It’s important in todays society you also spend time educating your students about how to recognize, manage, and express healthy emotions and feelings or psychological problems.
Here are some engaging ways to teach children about expressing and coping with emotions in the classroom.
- Ruben Knapen & Lucie Renard -
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Teaching Children Empathy
In today’s world, empathy often seems to be in short supply. Every day, the headlines are full of politicians locking horns, celebrities firing insults at each other and stories of bullying, racism and hatred.
The next generation has the power to make a big difference, and we educators can’t underestimate the importance of raising our students to be caring, empathetic beings.
- TheSchoolRun 2021 -
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Develop Empathy Skills with ClassDojo
ClassDojo and Harvard University's Making Caring Common Project collaborated to create a three-episode video series all about empathy. Find these empathy episodes along with some amazing activities to help strengthen your students' empathy skills.
- ClassDojo, Inc -
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Empathy Class Curriculum and Classroom Games
A teacher’s guide to the Empathy Class, a curriculum designed to help students of all ages practice empathy and improve emotional intelligence using fun activities and lessons.
- #StandTogether -
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Teaching Empathy | Kindness and Compassion for Kids
Empathy is one of the most important social skills a child can learn. Empathy is the ability to share and understand other people's feelings. By teaching empathy in the classroom students learn to understand one another and build friendships based on trust. Teaching empathy could be one of the answers to decreasing bullying.- Alison Smith -
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Teach Kindness & Empathy to Reduce Bullying Online & at School
Experts advocate for teaching kindness and empathy in schools to reduce bullying. Why? Because kindness is the antithesis of bullying and empathy is the foundation of kindness. - RippleKindness -
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The Great Kindness Challenge - Virtual Classroom Edition
The GKC - Virtual Classroom Edition is a 17-week SEL-focused kindness program for grades 2-8. Using a 50-item online-friendly kindness checklist as well as 50 corresponding kindness mini-lessons addressing core CASEL SEL competencies, students are challenged to perform 3 kind acts per week.
- Kids for Peace -
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Brain Breaks: What You Need to Know
Brain breaks can help reduce anxiety, which is common in kids with learning and thinking differences. And being able to return to a task and get it done can build self-confidence and self-esteem. It can also show kids that there are lots of ways to work on challenges and stay motivated.
- Amanda Morin -
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10 Brain Break Activities to Help Preschoolers Focus
Are you a teacher looking for activities for the children in your preschool class?
Here are some great ideas that will work both in class and at home.
- Tanja Mcilroy -
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20 Three-Minute Brain Breaks
These brain breaks are great to use anytime your students are feeling restless and are struggling to pay attention. Most of these will only take a few minutes, and then you can get back to the lesson with your students ready to focus on the lesson at hand.
- MINDS IN BLOOM -
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Brain Breaks for the Classroom at Every Grade Band
Our brains are a lot like computers, only significantly more valuable. If you want your students to be attentive, stay on task, and (most importantly) encode the information you are giving them into their memory, you have to give their brains regular breaks.
- Brittany Williamson -
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Positive Psychology In Schools and Education For Happy Students
This article will cover what positive education is and why it matters, as well as how to use it to benefit everyone in a classroom, from the students to the instructor.
Explore the activities for emoitonal learning, mindfulness activities and positive psychology activities for teens!
- PositivePsychology.com -
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6 Ways to Use Emotion to Increase Engagement in the Middle or High School Classroom
This video will empower teachers to engage students more fully in a lesson, create a more passionate curriculum, and help students learn more about and self-regulate their emotional life.
- Thomas Armstrong -
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5 Strategies For Incorporating Social Emotional Learning Into Your Classroom
This article talks about 5 strategies to incorporate social emotional learning into classrooms, which will not only benefit students, but will also be beneficial to teacher’s well-being.
- Teach Thought -
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21 Simple Ways to Integrate Social-Emotional Learning Throughout the Day
Here are 21 simple ways you can support social-emotional learning for your students every day.
- We Are Teachers -
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Top Tips for Teachers: Creating Mentally Healthy Schools
This website talks about how to create a school environment that is mentally healthy for students and also provides resources to help students achieve that.
- Mental Health Foundation -
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