Integrating Social Emotional Learning Activities for Students
In today's educational landscape, teachers are increasingly recognizing the importance of integrating social-emotional learning (SEL) into their classrooms. SEL activities foster crucial life skills such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship building, and responsible decision-making. These skills not only support academic success but also equip students with the tools they need to navigate the complexities of life. Fortunately, incorporating SEL into the classroom doesn't have to be an overwhelming task. There are numerous ways to seamlessly integrate SEL activities into the daily routine without sacrificing valuable instructional time. This article provides a comprehensive guide to various SEL activities suitable for students of all ages, from preschool to high school.
Building a Positive Classroom Environment
Personalized Greetings: A simple yet effective SEL technique is to start the day with personalized greetings at the door. This allows for a quick check-in with each student and sets a positive tone for the day. Use a greeting sign to give students a choice in how they greet you each day.
Morning Meetings: Start each day with a guided morning meeting. Any educator can implement a daily morning meeting with some easy steps: greetings, a SEL-focused topic, guided discussion questions, a few activities, and a closing or reflection. A morning meeting may look a little different from one classroom to the next, and can include a range of activities from getting to know you conversations to themed prompts focused on a specific content area.
Mindful Morning Check-In: Use a mindful morning check-in to start the day. It is a five-step process that involves taking 5 deep breaths, listing 4 things you notice around you, identifying 3 things you are grateful for, saying 2 positive self-talk statements, and naming 1 thing you are looking forward to for the day.
Classroom Jobs: Help build responsibility by assigning classroom jobs. Examples of jobs might include paper collector, technology set up, and lunch counter. Classroom jobs build self-management and responsibility skills.
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Community Building Games: Fun community-building games and reflection questions can help students establish and improve their group dynamics and communication.
Cultivating Self-Awareness
Feelings Identification: Little kids have big feelings, and they need to learn the words to match their emotions. Use a feelings bundle for various social-emotional learning activities. You can incorporate a feelings check-in each day with younger students and provide older students with all the words they need to describe their feelings in a journal prompt.
Feelings Scale: Help kids identify their emotions with a Feelings Scale. Emotion identification is not only the first step to self-regulation, but it is also a coping skill in and of itself.
SEL Journaling: Provide a SEL journal prompt each morning for kids to respond to. If your students are still working on writing skills, they can draw their responses and share aloud. Provide a daily check-in journal first thing each day. This allows students to share how they are feeling, while also integrating other SEL skills and supports that kids need. Younger students can get in the habit of writing their thoughts and feelings with weekly journal prompts.
Gratitude Lists: Once a day (or when time allows), have students write out a gratitude list. They should list out 3 things they are grateful for that day. These can be big things, like family or friends, but they can also be seemingly small things, like the smell of chocolate chip cookies or comfortable shoes. Use a bullet journal or list to reinforce gratitude. In younger classrooms, have students call out the things they are grateful for and create a class list.
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Self-Portraits: Use art activities to allow for self-expression while integrating SEL skills at the same time. Use self-portraits to focus on self-awareness.
Developing Self-Management Skills
Expressing Emotions: According to some research, just expressing our emotions can help alleviate those very feelings.
Coping Strategies: Healthy coping skills are essential to learning how to manage emotions and stress. Make it a point to practice coping strategies together, such as listening to music, drawing, reading, exercising, practicing yoga, and talking with a friend. The end of the day is the perfect time for reflection. That includes thinking about what went well, what students learned, what they are most proud of, and how they feel. Get a set of free printable posters with coping strategies for preschool, elementary school, middle school, and high school.
Positive Self-Talk: Positive self-talk helps students feel confident and ready for success. Choose favorite positive affirmations, create a list, and read them together. The words students tell themselves impacts their self-management, persistence, and ultimately their success. Model and reinforce positive self-talk with a self-talk poster. Use daily affirmation cards to help students develop positive self-talk. Pass them out at the start of a week and have students reflect on what each statement means to them. Can they incorporate their statement into their internal talk this week? Build positive self-talk skills with color by affirmation worksheets! Students read the positive self-talk phrases and color in the image.
Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness is learning how to be present in the moment. This self-regulation technique helps students feel calm, focused, and happier. Start your practice with mindful breathing exercises. At the start of a lesson or day, take a few minutes for mindfulness. Choose mindfulness activities that match your class.
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Calm-Down Corner: A calm-down corner is a space students can go to when they need space to manage their emotions. A calm-down strategy that students can take with them, a DIY calming jar is a great craft that you can use to talk about the importance of emotional regulation and self-management.
Brain Breaks: Breaks are a critically important part of replenishing self-regulation skills. Provide brain breaks through movement like yoga or mindful breathing exercises. Schedule them into the day (such as between tasks) or use them when you notice students just need to refocus. When you’re transitioning from one activity to another, take advantage of the brain break time to sneak in some social-emotional learning activities. Brain breaks-where you completely set aside academic work and spend time moving, listening, or even being silent-help students reset and get ready for more learning.
Goal Setting: Setting goals contributes to responsibility, but it doesn’t come naturally. We have to teach students how to set meaningful, reasonable targets, and then give them the tools to track their progress. Seeing how they are progressing also helps students build resilience and perspective. Near the end of each marking period, have students complete a goal-setting sheet to reflect on what they’re doing to contribute to their grade (turning in assignments on time, organizing paperwork, utilizing feedback).
Impulse Control: Our Impulse Control Questionnaires offer a thoughtful, structured approach to guide students in understanding their actions, improving self-awareness, and developing better impulse control. Perfect for use in classrooms, counseling sessions, or individual therapy, these questionnaires are versatile tools to promote meaningful reflection and growth.
Enhancing Social Awareness
SEL Discussion Starters: Provide a targeted SEL question (or a few questions) and have students chat to discuss. Use SEL discussion-starters, such as: What is a good choice you’ve made recently? What could you teach someone else? What are some skills you feel most confident in? These questions are helpful to build relationships within the classroom, and they also allow for further discussion of critical SEL skills (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships, and decision-making). Provide one SEL question of the day. Project it or write it on the board. Give students time to discuss with a partner and write about it.
Read Alouds: Integrate social-emotional skills and reading using read alouds and stories. The truth is that read alouds are fun and engaging for kids of all ages (even big kids). Start or end your day with a read aloud, highlighting relevant SEL skills before, during, and after the story. You can choose a read aloud to work on a specific SEL skill (empathy or friendships, for example), or you can pick up any book and see where it takes you. A story can be a model for social-emotional skills or it can introduce students to scenarios they haven’t experienced yet. For younger students, read a picture book and talk about what happens and how the characters feel. For older students, read and discuss novels with SEL themes.
"What Would You Do?" Scenarios: Integrate SEL skills by discussing some “What would you do?” scenarios. For example, you might ask, “You have a big test tomorrow, but a friend wants you to go out to the movies. What would you do?” Have students talk and share ideas to learn and grow.
Class Meetings: Hold a class meeting on a regular basis to review expectations and solve problems together. These become a healthy spot to work on conflict resolution skills, as students can share struggles they are working through and get feedback from others. Morning meeting is an important part of elementary school and provides a time for students to reflect on their feelings and actions, talk about concerns that arise during the day, or engage in collaborative decision-making.
Quotes: Quotes are character-building! Share a meaningful social-emotional quote on the board. Have students discuss and share what it means to them.
Understanding Diversity: Understanding diversity is important for self-awareness and relationship building.
Fairness Lesson: Build students’ social awareness with teacher Aimee Scott’s fairness lesson. Her quick and simple exercise helps kids understand that fairness doesn’t mean everyone gets the same thing-it means everyone gets what they need to be successful.
Upstander Reminders: Teach kids about the concept, their role in helping build classroom community and helping those who might not feel included, and hang these free printable upstander posters in your classroom. The tear tags offer positive affirmations.
Current Events Discussions: Show students how to find a variety of sources to learn about current events. Teach them to think critically and evaluate articles to separate provable facts from opinion.
Fostering Relationship Skills
Circle Sharing: Once a day, gather as a group in a circle. Use targeted relationship-building questions to share. It’s important to give everyone a chance to share who wants to. To encourage active listening, create small groups. Have your students position their chairs in a circle so everyone can make eye contact. To strengthen empathy, you can facilitate deeper discussion around what a student shares by asking, “Why did that student share what they did?” or “What perspective is that student coming from?”
Compliment Bulletin Board: Create a bulletin board in the classroom where students can give “shout outs” to others. The idea is that students can give compliments and kind feedback to their peers and teachers. For example, a student might give a classmate a shout out for helping them organize their notebook.
Sharing Items and Ideas: Once a week, give students a chance to share items and ideas that are important to them. They might share an art project they created or a new game they got for their birthday at home.
Group Activities and Challenges: Help students build a stronger community by implementing group activities and challenges.
Active Listening Exercises: Incorporating exercises that enhance verbal and non-verbal communication skills can aid students in articulating their thoughts and emotions clearly and confidently. By engaging in role-playing scenarios and group discussions, students can have a practical platform to practice their listening and communication skills.
Cooperative Games: Kids get plenty of exposure to healthy (and unhealthy) competition, so use classroom time to shift the focus to cooperation instead. Cooperative games encourage kids to communicate, collaborate, and problem-solve together. Point out the skills they’re using during the cooperative games that will help them in relationships as well.
Icebreakers: Icebreakers are great for the first day of school, but you can actually incorporate them all year long. Use them when you form new project groups, or when you change the seating around in your room.
Friendship Reminders: Everyone can use a reminder about how to make and keep friends. Use friendship videos in morning meeting to talk about how to make and keep friends. With older students, use them as a friendly and funny reminder of what students likely already know but might not be practicing.
Encouraging Responsible Decision-Making
SEL Skill of the Day: Introduce one meaningful SEL skill of the day (or week). Briefly discuss it and ask some guided questions.
SEL Crafts: Provide hands-on learning opportunities with SEL crafts. Have students make a coping strategies wheel or practice mindfulness with hands-on tools.
SEL Games: Many games build social-emotional skills. Use games to fill some end-of-the-week reward time, also weaving in those social-emotional skills at the same time. Board games teach lots of decision-making skills. Players have to analyze information, consider their options, and imagine the impacts of their moves on themselves and others.
Choice Boards: If we want kids to make smart decisions, we’ve got to give them the chance to make choices on their own. One way to do this in the classroom is using choice boards. These interactive tools give kids several options to choose from on an assignment.
Escape Rooms: Students love the interactivity of an escape room, where they have to work together to solve a series of problems before their time is up. Escape rooms encourage a lot of responsible decision-making skills, both individually and as a group.
Service Learning Projects: Service learning projects get kids involved in their communities, finding and implementing solutions to real-world problems.
Adapting SEL Activities for Different Age Groups
The strategies mentioned above can be adapted for various age groups, from preschool to high school. For younger children, focus on basic emotions, simple coping skills, and building positive relationships through play and stories. As students mature, introduce more complex concepts like empathy, conflict resolution, and responsible decision-making.
Additional Resources
- SEL Curriculum: I’ve developed a complete yearlong social-emotional learning curriculum for elementary students grades 3-5. It comes with everything you need to target skills like empathy, decision-making, confidence, friendships, self-control, and more.
- Centervention Educator Account: For a comprehensive set of activities, along with flexible filtering and sorting capabilities, simply log in to your Centervention Educator account and navigate to the Assist MH page.
- Free Printable Posters: Get a set of free printable posters with coping strategies for kids and teens.
- Positive Thinking Affirmations: Use these 100+ free positive thinking affirmations and self-talk statements to help kids and young adults build confidence, learn healthy coping strategies, and start the day off strong.
- SEL Choice Boards: Use free social emotional learning choice boards to encourage kids to practice a variety of SEL skills. Activities include journaling, responding to prompts, discussing topics with others, drawing, and more.
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