Young people today are growing up in an increasingly complex world. At times it can seem dangerous and confusing, especially with the incidence of hate crimes up for the third year in a row (as reported by the FBI). Helping your students to feel, and stay, safe yet empowered to confront hate, injustice and inequality is an important outcome of Social Emotional Learning. Knowing how to adequately address these polarizing issues is often a challenge for educators.
Here’s a Strategy That Works!
Grades 2-12
The Sharing Circle provides a simple process and emotionally safe environment that builds a student community that helps build trust and fosters meaningful conversation. The topics discussed in the Sharing Circle provides students the opportunity to discuss and reflect on their own identity and to develop self-awareness and understanding of others.
Here’s a wonderful Sharing Circle from Lessons In Tolerance And Diversityour complete guide to everything you need to know to have success with Sharing Circle Topics
Here’s Your Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
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• Leading a Sharing Circle
• Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources
• Free Activities
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Most educators today are aware of the benefits of creating and maintaining positive relationships with students. Meaningful relationships do matter. All people want to feel valued and cared for by others, and to be listened to in a non-judgemental manner. Students are no different. Students especially want their teachers to treat them with respect, to appreciate their feelings, desires, hopes and dreams and to recognize them as unique individuals.
Mounting research says that positive teacher-student relationships are the basis for a positive school experience. It increases student motivation and engagement while decreasing the challenges of discipline, absenteeism, and drop out rates. A caring, affirming relationship between teacher and student is the key to this positive learning environment.
How Good Relationships Are Created
Positive relationships are developed in many ways large and small. Showing interest, smiling often, really listening to their concerns, providing positive reinforcement, and acknowledging effort all contribute to relationship building. The process of verbal interaction, coupled with attention and acceptance, is a key avenue to establishing and maintaining positive relationships. It’s through this verbal exchange that you get to know your students as individuals, what they care about, what their interests are, their hopes for the future, what they might be struggling with right now, and how their cultural backgrounds and life experience impacts their school life.
All Grades
Engaging in meaningful conversation with your students is vitally important to making them feel you care. Creating goodwill and positive connections don’t happen readily when attempted on a haphazard basis, but should be a regular, imbedded part of a classroom or group setting. Sharing Circles provide a smooth, easily implemented strategy for creating just such an experience. Through the emotional safety of sharing established in the Sharing Circle process to the provided topics which cover the whole range of human experience, the circle assists you in getting to know your students as individuals, to learn what’s important to them, their backgrounds and culture, their strengths and challenges. You get to know who they are in all their unique dimensions. Another important aspect is that you, as the teacher or counselor, get to share about yourself too. It’s by sharing your humanity with your students that you create a two way bond of mutual caring and concern.
Here’s a wonderful Sharing Circle from The Sharing Circle Handbook our complete guide to everything you need to know to have success with Sharing Circle Topics
Here’s Your Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
Do you want more information?
• Leading a Sharing Circle
• Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources
• Free Activities
• Subscribe
If you like our blog resources and would like to receive them regularly, please subscribe here or on our website at www.InnerchoicePublishing.com
If you are already a subscriber, I hope you find this activity valuable. Help us grow our blog by sharing these activities and encouraging others to join. Thank you.
Helping children build an emotional vocabulary encourages a firm foundation in social and emotional competence. Being able to identify what you are feeling and to be able to effectively understand what others are feeling is a necessary part of social awareness. In order to correctly identify feelings in yourself and others you first have to have words for those feelings. There is a large and varied vocabulary of emotions and feeling words beyond happy, sad, and mad. People of all ages need an assortment of words for their feeling vocabulary in order to express their feelings well, and to be able to read and respond appropriately to the emotional cues coming from others. A feeling vocabulary that is large and complex permits children to discriminate between feelings and to effectively communicate to others what they are experiencing. Being able to accurately identify and label feelings in others allows children to understand and successfully manage social situations.
How An Emotional Vocabulary Develops
Elementary
Children acquire this vocabulary of self-awareness and social-awareness by direct instruction and by observing what’s happening around them. Many experiences, both purposeful and happenstance, help children develop an extensive feeling vocabulary. Hearing feeling words used around them, having stories read to them that use rich vocabulary, and participating in social activities all encourage children to expand and label their feelings appropriately. In today’s classrooms and counseling groups the development of social and emotional skills and related vocabulary should be fostered in multiple ways and through presenting a variety of activities. Today’s blog activity comes from the book, Social and Emotional Learning Activities For The Elementary Grades, and provides an effective way to expand the feeling vocabulary of your students.
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We hope you’re having a terrific spring. Today’s activity and Experience Sheet are from a book about three formidable feelings, grief, fear and anger.
The Reality
Children cannot be protected from them and they can’t be immunized against them. At various points in their young lives, they will suffer the loss of goals, hopes, dreams, friendships, pets and people. They will fear failure, abandonment, punishment, rejection and countless real and imaginary threats to their safety and security. And there will be no ducking their wrath. They will spend countless hours reacting in anger to siblings, peers, authority figures and themselves.
Grades 3-8
Grief, fear and anger are significant emotions, so weighty in fact that they often drive children to think irrational thoughts and engage in unreasonable behaviors. Such responses left unchecked can easily spiral into destructive actions. If we want children to succeed in life, we must equip them with the tools to manage these intense feelings. Grief, fear and anger are annoyingly persistent companions, popping up regularly throughout life.
Taking a Step in the Right Direction
This week’s activity comes from the book Helping Kids Manage Grief, Fear and Anger. The activities, discussions, role plays, simulations and worksheets presented in this book are designed to help children explore, understand and express their feelings in safe and acceptable ways.Easy-to-understand explanations coupled with skill practice promote healthy responses to intense and sometimes overwhelming emotions.Children become more centered and focused, communicate more effectively, and demonstrate greater interdependence and understanding.
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Many of us don’t realize that by simply listening to students talk and share their inner thoughts and issues we can immensely facilitate their personal development. It’s by sharing their thoughts and feelings and experiences openly and in a non-judgmental setting that students gain important life skills and self-knowledge. Once they see that we do not intend to “change” them and that they may speak freely without being “wrong,” students find it easier to examine themselves and begin to see areas where they can make positive change in their lives. It’s through sharing and being truly listened to that students clarify their thoughts, and learn effective methods of self-expression. With this kind of true listening they are encouraged to go deeper, find their own direction, and express and face strong feelings that may at other times be hidden obstacles to their growth. The important point is that students really can solve their own problems, develop self-awareness, and learn skills that assist them in becoming responsible members of society if they are listened to effectively.
The Perfect Strategy
The Sharing Circle, which provides both the opportunity for students to be listened to, and to listen to others, is the prime teaching tool that we have developed in our curriculum guides to foster these valuable life skills in all students K – 12.
Grades K-12 The Sharing Circle provides a safe place for students to share their thoughts and experience, hopes, and fears, dreams and desires etc. in response to a specific topic. As students follow the rules of good communication and relate to each other verbally during the circle they are practicing oral communication and learning to listen actively. It’s through insights developed in the course of pondering and discussing various topics that students are offered the opportunity to grow in awareness and to feel more masterful – more in control of their feelings, thoughts and behaviors. It’s through these positive experiences of listening and being listened to that they learn more about effective modes of social interaction.
A Listening Forum
Just as the Sharing Circle provides a process for students to learn about themselves through self-expression and exploration, it also teaches students to be good listeners. The rules of the Sharing Circle (listening to the person who is speaking, without probing, put-downs, or gossip) demand that each student give active attention to the speaker. Through the regular practice of good listening by the teacher or counselor leading the circle, the students begin to internalize good listening habits.
Your Sharing Circles
Today we are providing two Sharing Circle topics designed to promote good listening from The Sharing Circle Handbook, Topics for Teaching Self-Awareness, Communication, and Social Skills for students in grades K-12. The topics are, Something I Like to Do Alone and Something I Like to Do With Other People.
Here’s Your Monday Morning Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
Do you want more information?
• Leading a Sharing Circle • Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources • Free Activities • Subscribe
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As small children begin to organize their worlds and translate thoughts into meaningful sentences understood by others, a sense of accomplishment develops.They realize that through language, much information can be gained about the world, and others can be influenced to respond to their needs.They also learn that language is a key to friendship.
The development of language in small children can be supported most effectively by educators and parents when they frequently converse with the children and encourage them to hold conversations with each other.These verbal experiences strengthen not only the development of language, but also thought, which contributes to the child’s ability to be more self-controlling.It is important to use concrete terms and normal inflection and pronunciation as in adult-to-adult conversation when talking to small children.They should never be “talked down” to.
PreK-Kindergarten
How You Can Facilitate This Learning
Today’s Blog activity comes from our book, Magic Circle: Language Development and Social-Emotional Learning for the Early Years. The process we call a Sharing Circle with older students, elementary through high school, is referred to as a Magic Circle with pre-schoolers and kindergarten students. As with Sharing Circles, Magic Circles are carefully structured safe social environments wherein young children can perform tasks, express themselves verbally, and receive positive acknowledgement for these actions and expressions.
Oral language is the principle mode of expression of Magic Circles.By speaking to their fellow circle members (peers and leader) and by listening to what others have to say, children’s growing abilities to verbally communicate are utilized and strengthened.Verbal expression is then built upon to inspire other forms of expression including art, reading, singing and drama.
Here is a Magic Circle Task entitled I Can Draw a Picture of Myself and Tell You About It for you to use with your children.
The Magic Circle has the same rules and structure as the Sharing Circle. If you want more information?
• Leading a Sharing Circle
• Sharing Circle Rules • Books and Resources
• Free Activities
• Subscribe
If you like our blog resources and would like to receive them regularly, please subscribe here or on our website at www.InnerchoicePublishing.com
If you are already a subscriber, I hope you find this activity valuable. Help us grow our blog by sharing these activities and encouraging others to join. Thank you.
Through self-awareness, students learn to give ongoing attention to their internal states, to know what they are feeling when they are feeling it, to identify the events that precipitate upsets and emotional hijackings, and to bring their feelings back under control.
Here’s Your Sharing Circle. Enjoy!
