A key aspect to understand in social and emotional learning is the importance of managing emotions. Incorporating ways to manage emotions in a classroom setting can help teach children skills necessary to live rewarding lives. If children can get an education that teaches them how to deal with emotions in a healthy way, they are more likely to thrive.
Managing emotions in a positive way has far-reaching benefits. Not only will a kid with the ability to self-regulate their feelings experience better social interactions, but there are also health benefits to effective emotional management. People who know how to manage their emotions in a positive way will have better cardiovascular health. (HHP) Good emotional health quite literally gives people good hearts.
While there are many techniques that might prove effective for positive emotional management, we have a favorite. The Empty Balloon is an exercise we often implement here at Soul Shoppe.
The Empty Balloon Exercise — How it Works
The Empty Balloon Exercise is an emotional management tool. It begins by having students visualize emotional states as big balloons. As the emotion expands, the imagined balloon expands. And what happens to balloons when they overinflate?
They pop.
In an effort to avoid emotional explosions, the idea is to find ways to release pressure from your emotional ballon before they pop.
Improving Emotional Intelligence for Elementary Students
Emotional intelligence is a critical factor in the effective management of emotions. The practice of improving emotional intelligence is a lifelong challenge for most of us. It’s valuable to prepare children with a solid foundation in understanding how to interpret and manage emotions. This includes their own and those of other people.
In order to improve emotional intelligence, teachers and parents can incorporate certain activities into their curricula. Such as: (DCE)
Self-awareness activities. Activities like journaling and role-playing help children learn self-awareness. Reading is also a good tool for learning self-awareness.
Practicing self-regulation. Exercises like pausing to breathe before reacting and recognizing your own emotions are important. Board games and active games like Simon Says help kids learn and practice self-regulation skills.
Empathy is an important part of improving emotional management. It may not come naturally for children to think about how other kids feel. Activities like check-ins including the whole class, or role-playing help students practice empathy.
Cultivating social skills. Nothing teaches emotional intelligence better than social interaction. Providing children with opportunities to practice social skills gives them practical experience in developing emotional awareness. Team sports and playing games as teams provide good aids in teaching social skills.
A lot goes into emotional intelligence. With a strong grounding in emotional awareness, students can learn lessons to help them manage and control their emotions in healthy ways. (HBS)
Sometimes children find it challenging to differentiate between feelings and emotions. It is important to develop the skills to identify when it is an emotion and when it is a feeling. Feelings are generally immediate reactions to situations, while emotions often involve a deeper psychological reality. (iMotions)
How to Manage and Control Emotions in Healthy Ways
Emotional balloons will inflate. Being human means having emotions. Developing emotional intelligence is a lifelong skill. When kids can identify what they’re feeling, they will have better luck deflating their emotional balloons.
There are a handful of good ways to deflate your emotional balloon. Here are a few: (SoulShoppe)
Hang out with friends. Social interaction helps raise emotional awareness and helps turn negative emotions into positive ones.
Dance it out. Engaging the body with an activity unrelated to a negative emotion helps reduce the pressure in your emotional balloon. Plus…
Listening to music is always a good emotional outlet!
Stop and breathe for a second before doing the next thing.
Read a book. If the problem is getting too deep into your own head, books are great ways to change how you’re thinking.
Give someone a hug. As naturally social animals, humans heal from positive physical contact.
Find a chuckle. Laughing stimulates endorphin production and helps with mood regulation.
Do something creative. Drawing a picture, singing a song, and writing some poetry, are all ways to redirect emotional energy in a positive way.
Talking to someone trustworthy will also help relieve emotional stress a lot of the time.
Cry if you need to!
There are a lot of ways to relieve pressure from your emotional balloon, or even empty it completely.
Peace Corner
Where can students go during the school day when they need a moment to empty their emotional balloons? A peace corner is a safe space that can be created in the classroom or at home where children can empty their emotional balloons. Find out how to create a peace corner here.
There are many opportunities for children to learn how to manage emotions in a positive way, at home and at school. Through creating and sharing social and emotional learning techniques, Soul Shoppe helps teachers and parents at home or in the classroom. Our SEL curriculum for elementary school students help children learn positive emotional management. We have developed tools like the Empty Emotional Balloon exercise and the Peace Corner to bring SEL tools to your curriculum. To learn about online SEL programs for elementary schools, click here. For home school social emotional programs, click here.
Taking responsibility for one’s actions can be a challenge for both children and adults. To our lower brains, voluntarily taking responsibility for actions feels like attracting consequences on purpose. It isn’t necessarily a natural instinct. On the other hand, higher executive functions tell us something different. Those functions help people live successful lives as contributing members of their communities. (DevelopingChild) Therefore, developing strength of character, to make taking responsibility for their actions a habit, helps children grow into strong community members. But how do we teach a child to take responsibility for their actions at home or at school? Let’s explore.
How To Teach a Child to Take Responsibility for Their Actions
Modeling
Taking responsibility for actions as well as approaching tasks responsibly requires the development of higher executive functions. Functions like working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control. (DevelopingChild)
In a classroom setting as well as in the home, the most effective teaching method for higher executive functions is modeling them. (MCC)
It’s important for teachers and parents to develop caring relationships with their children.
Adults should make an effort to be strong and healthy role models. Children see everything and they’re always learning.
It should be made clear by parents and teachers that caring matters.
Additionally, children need to be given opportunities to practice caring. This might include volunteering opportunities or other activities that teach responsibility.
Expose children to a wider understanding of the cares of the world, within reason, to help them to build empathy.
Modeling healthy behavior will teach children higher executive functions, such as taking responsibility for their actions. Educators and parents can reinforce the lessons through activities and games that teach responsibility.
Role-playing helps to teach children about outcomes of scenarios that haven’t occurred yet. Set up a scenario where the person in the scenario did something that affected others negatively. Prompt the child to take responsibility for their actions, and then demonstrate a positive outcome. Praise the child in the scenario. You might say something like, “Sometimes it can be hard to tell the truth. I’m so glad you were honest and told me about what happened. Let’s work together to fix the situation.”
Tidying up their Workspace
Nobody likes cleaning up the workspace at the end of the day. Right?
What if it’s turned into a game? Maybe at the end of the day, turn tidying up the classroom into a game. Perhaps race to see who can clean up their space first.
It’s possible to reframe tidying up as a positive and rewarding activity. It can easily become an effective technique for teaching responsibility to students.
Help in the Kitchen
Kids can learn a lot about responsibility from cooking. Kitchens are full of tools that have to be used responsibly in order to be useful and not dangerous. Cooking requires attention to detail and effective planning. It also comes with an automatic reward for doing it right in the form of a cake, or a batch of cookies, or a meal.
Because most recipes also come with several jobs and tools, parents or educators can assign responsibilities to different children. One kid can be in charge of the recipe. Another kid might be responsible for the measuring cups or measuring spoons. There might be a child entirely in charge of setting and watching timers.
Kitchens come ready-made with tools that teach responsibility.
Reorganize the Workspace
Maybe a classroom, a playroom, or a reading area isn’t the most sensible layout and has the potential for restructuring. Children can learn a lot about taking responsibility for their own space if the following question is raised: “How would you reorganize this space?”
Students can learn higher cognitive skills from an exercise involving reorganizing their classroom or workspace. They will need to practice planning in order to think about making changes to the current layout. Reorganizing might involve negotiation and compromise if one kid has one idea and another kid has a different idea.
The end result will be rewarding to all children involved. They get to feel like they were responsible for a positive change in their environment.
Animal Care
If there is a class pet or animal at home, then caring for the animal will help teach responsibility. Children will have to learn how to make adjustments in their schedules to take care of the animal. There are also lessons in remembering to keep to a schedule. Caring for an animal comes with a sense of responsibility since a child’s actions affect the well-being of another living thing. Children can also learn community interaction skills if the whole class bears responsibility for the class pet.
Corporate Garden
Similar to caring for an animal, planting a garden as a class, or at home, helps children learn how to take responsibility for their actions. This activity requires that they pay attention to the care and needs of the plants, attending to the everyday requirements of weeding and watering. Children will need to think about how the weather might affect their garden. They might have to take responsibility for creating shelter for the plants or checking the soil. Gardens teach time management skills as well as working memory.
Teaching Responsibility
It’s important to teach a child how to take responsibility for their actions. By using games and activities that teach accountability, teachers and parents can help children develop higher cognitive skills. It is also important to live the lessons being taught. Kids learn by example. If their teachers and parents demonstrate responsible behaviors, children will likely model them too.
Self-control is one of the most important life skills anyone can learn. By providing lessons that nurture self-control skills, parents and teachers can set children up for success later in life. (UsableKnowledge)
Classroom games are a great way to teach self-control as a social and emotional skill. Social and emotional learning skills that contribute to self-control help children succeed in academia and outside the classroom. In this article, we’ll explore the functions of self-control as well as self-control games and activities that apply those functions.
Self-Control Functions
First, it is necessary to understand the functions contributing to self-control. With an understanding of those functions, it’s possible to begin developing games and activities that create learning opportunities for children.
The functions contributing to the development of self-control are: (DevelopingChild)
Working memory. This is when a person knows how to effectively store information in their mind and use it effectively when necessary.
Inhibitory control. This is the ability to pause and reflect on compulsions and impulses. Inhibitory control is mastery over temptations, distractions, and behaviors that might develop into habits.
Cognitive flexibility. Identifying priorities, adjusting perspective, and adapting to the demands of new situations are all under the umbrella of cognitive flexibility. A capacity for this mental resilience is a necessary part of self-control.
Incorporating practices for working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility will be essential in creating self-control activities for students.
It’s a good possibility that parents and teachers already have activities and games in their resources that teach self-control. Many activities and games children find fun are already good teaching opportunities for self-control. They just need a little more context in order to become more effective self-control strategies for students.
Here are some self-control games that teachers and parents can use:
Self-Control Games
Card Games and Board Games
Card games and board games are excellent aids in teaching self-control strategies to students. Rule-based and goal-oriented card games and board games help children to practice using executive functions to achieve goals. At the same time, card games and board games are social. They put children in scenarios where they have to interact with other children to reach their goals. Children are well-served by practicing a habit of approaching problems with an understanding of how behaviors relate to results. (HBS)
For example:
Card games require children to keep track of numbers and rules and exercise their working memory.
Board games need fast decision-making in challenging situations.
Games are built on strategic thinking, where a decision now relates to an abstract event in the future. These are especially valuable because children have to make decisions involving other people’s actions. Children will start to understand how their own choices relate to the decisions of other people.
Complex rule sets. The mere practice of learning and playing within a complex set of rules gives children practice for higher functions.
Implementing these games with a more intentional approach will better teach self-control strategies. When children are playing, compliment how they are being cooperative and following rules. When they are frustrated, praise them when they aren’t having an outburst. This will help encourage them to continue having self-control while playing.
Physical Activities or Games
In addition to indoor activities, parents and teachers can use outdoor activities for teaching children self-control.
Organized sports place children in situations that teach them higher cognitive functions. When children play sports they are regularly practicing the functions of self-control. Remembering rules and habits of play practices working memory. Avoiding cheating and channeling energy practices inhibitory control. Practicing ingenuity and imaginative solutions helps children with cognitive flexibility.
How much self-control children learn from physical activities like organized sports will depend on how those activities are framed for them. Organized sports already have all the teaching elements. They just need to be explained in a social and emotional learning context.
Music, Singing, Dancing, and Other Creative Pursuits
The discipline and emotional engagement of various creative pursuits create a positive learning context for self-control. Pursuing a creative discipline teaches children many higher cognitive functions. (Harvard)
For example:
When children learn a musical instrument, it helps them practice self-monitoring and selective attention. Learning a musical instrument also teaches working memory as they memorize songs and practice using the instrument correctly.
Musical classes can also provide social opportunities for children. Playing in a band or orchestra helps students to practice cognitive flexibility in order to cooperate with the other children.
Dancing provides similar opportunities to practice higher cognitive skills that contribute to self-control strategies for students.
These creative activities, and others, provide students the ability to practice skills that contribute to self-control. Painting, writing, woodworking, sculpture–pretty much every creative activity has an element of disciplined goal-orientedness that helps children practice self-control. Teachers and parents can use all creative endeavors as social and emotional learning tools.
Stop, Breathe, and Think
Sometimes normal games aren’t enough to help students regulate self-control. In moments when students are having an emotional moment, they can be taught how to expel their energy in a positive way. Using the Stop, Breathe, and Think Technique children are taught to realize when their emotional balloons are full and retreat to a designated corner to control themselves. They can use fun breathing exercises like the bees breathing technique that James uses here to release that emotional energy.
Learn about creating a peace corner for your classroom or home here.
Social and emotional learning means everything to us over here at Soul Shoppe. We have developed teaching tools and techniques to help teachers and parents at school and at home. With tools like our Stop and Breathe Technique and our peace corner, we give educators everywhere the resources they need to help students with social-emotional learning. Click for information on SEL programs for elementary schools or social emotional homeschool electives.
Games create excellent teaching and learning experiences. Through games, we create microcosms of the world as a whole. In games, students can set rules and can practice setting and achieving goals. Perhaps among the most important advantages of games is the opportunity to practice behaviors. These behaviors are important for navigating life on so many levels.
The basic teaching technique of “see one, do one, teach one” is often the format of games. Additionally, games engage students on emotional and nonverbal levels. Therefore, students can learn social and emotional skills.
Games are particularly valuable for behaviors like sharing. Teaching sharing skills in the classroom through sharing games will give students a tool to develop stronger relationships.
Sharing is one of the fundamental behaviors of a well-socialized community. However, the act of sharing can cause internal conflict in children. Children below a certain age find it natural to share. At the same time, there’s a point when children discover that too much sharing means they have less for themselves. (GSE)
Designing Sharing Games for Elementary School Students
For kindergarten students, it’s important to design activities that give them a chance to practice sharing in a straightforward way. As children age and their minds develop more, lessons in sharing must also grow in complexity. More advanced lessons in sharing teach more complicated life skills. Sharing games, if designed well, can teach skills like negotiation, resource management, and community engagement. (PON) Well-designed sharing games for elementary students create layered learning opportunities.
Here are a few examples of sharing games for elementary students.
Resource Sharing Game
Based on studies made on the interplay of game theory and community, the Resource Sharing Game can be incorporated into other activities. (arxiv)
The basic idea is that some resource is controlled by an individual or subset of the main group. Maybe they control all the art supplies, cleaning supplies, or building supplies. Then the whole group is given a task to accomplish. The class is divided into groups, each with a part of the task to accomplish.
Every group will need to get supplies and tools from the kids with the job of distributing the supplies and tools.
This game creates an environment where children think about the nuances of sharing resources within a community. Nuances like:
Temporal realities. Sometimes the resource isn’t available at the moment and they’ll need to wait until it is available.
Scarcity. If there isn’t quite enough of a resource–such as there’s not quite enough purple paint–they might be required to come up with an imaginative solution. Maybe the community will need to be more careful with its sharing. Maybe the community will need to find some replacement resources. Maybe the community will need to find an alternative source of the resource such as finding red paint and blue paint and mixing them together.
Organization of sharing. At a basic level, sharing is transactional. (I.e. You and I share our toys.) In a more advanced setting, sharing might have a broader implication. For instance, learning how to share with members of the larger community rather than their immediate circle may require a little more persuasion. They might also have to learn how to share with people outside of that community.
Negotiation. Children generally grow to be more successful adults when they learn from an early age how to get what they want and need through polite negotiation.
The Pizza Sharing Game
Also known as the Concurrent Graph Sharing Game, the Pizza Sharing Game has a simple setup. However, in spite of its simplicity, it provides a fertile learning environment for teaching kids the social and emotional depths of sharing. (arxiv)
To start, two kids get a handful of objects put between them. It can be toys or snacks, or construction paper made to look like pizza. They take turns taking one or two objects from the middle. The game is over when the last object is picked up.
The Pizza Sharing game can be played in a couple of ways:
Make the end goal to take the last piece or item.
Or have the person they’re playing with take the last item.
The game provides children with the experience of making plans with their resources. Sometimes sharing is more complicated than “you get some and I get some.” In adulthood, sharing sometimes means making strategic and sometimes difficult decisions about who gets what. It also challenges the idea of making sure the right people get the right stuff. The Pizza Sharing Game encourages students to approach sharing with a problem-solving attitude.
Cooperative Board Games
Stuff isn’t all that’s shared. Playing board games in a cooperative way helps students learn how to share less physical things like:
Responsibility
Goal setting
Authority
A sense of success or failure
It’s important that students rotate roles when they play board games cooperatively. Some kids have a natural tendency to take charge. Other kids might naturally give way to other students. That is a perfect dynamic to interrupt for educational purposes so that all children can learn more diverse social and emotional skills.
Teaching Sharing in the Classroom
The classroom is a place to stretch ideas and grow. Sharing can go far beyond what children learn in their preschool years.
For more social emotional learning ideas, click here.
In a recent blog, we talked about using trauma-informed teaching strategies to foster a safe learning environment for all students. The unfortunate fact is that some children have past or current trauma that they’re dealing with. (USDVA) Since it’s not always possible to know which students have a traumatic experience in their backgrounds, especially when they are new to a class, educators just have to assume that they will have some students dealing with trauma in their classes. (CDC)
It might not always be possible to prepare for individual cases of trauma, but it is possible to incorporate trauma-informed activities for students into a lesson plan. Trauma-informed lesson plans help students recognize their classrooms as safe places to learn and ask questions. Educators are a large part of a child’s developmental process. With a deft understanding of the realities of recovering from trauma, a teacher can be part of a child’s healing process. (GSE)
Take a look at this overview of a few trauma-informed activities for students.
Trauma-Informed Activities for Students
Trauma-Informed Icebreakers
For a lot of kids, trauma has the most pronounced effect on their ability to integrate socially. (SDLab)
Trauma-informed icebreakers have a twofold positive impact on the lives of students.
Firstly, effective trauma-informed icebreakers provide a more comfortable way for students to be welcomed into a classroom.
Secondly, in the long run, using trauma-informed icebreakers will provide children with tools to carry into their later lives. Children with trauma in their backgrounds will be prepared with effective icebreakers to use in future social interactions. Additionally, children without trauma in their backgrounds will be better prepared for interactions with people coping with traumatic experiences in the future.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the subject of icebreakers and there are many resources available to help design them. (IQA) However, ensuring icebreakers are trauma-informed requires one more layer of review.
Approach creating icebreakers with these five things in mind:
Encourage positive relationships.
Create a safe and welcoming physical space.
Use positive priming, i.e., set the tone.
Identify and encourage character strengths.
Encourage resilience with affirmative language tactics–I can do this, I am capable of this, etc.
Creating trauma-informed icebreakers with these things in mind will help prepare children for new social experiences.
A great example of this is Beach Ball Bonding. (SCS) This is where you toss the beach ball around the room and the person who catches it shares something about themselves. For younger children, prompts can be as simple as “What’s your favorite candy?” For older students, you might ask social-emotional questions like, “What do you do to calm yourself when you’re upset?” Or, “Tell us about something you’d like to see improved in the school.”
Circles: Compliment, Affirmation Language, and Community
Mediated conversations where all students get to participate in a subject with positive intent help to create a safe sense of belonging among all students. Particularly students with trauma in their backgrounds who may find it difficult to feel at ease in a group setting.
In the pursuit of creating a safe and nurturing environment for all students, but particularly for those students with traumatic experiences in their backgrounds, it might prove valuable to incorporate classroom conversations. (KickBoard) Some examples include:
Compliment circles. Everyone in class gets a chance to pay a compliment to everyone else in the class.
Affirmation language circles. Everyone gets a chance to say something affirming or encouraging about everyone in the class, for example, that they are capable of overcoming something challenging.
Community circles. Everyone in class gets a chance to exchange something that builds community, for example finding things they have in common that they might not have known they shared.
Conversations like this can go a long way toward making all students feel like the classroom is a safe and inclusive place.
Journaling
Sometimes writing down thoughts feels less intimidating than talking about them out loud. When children have intense emotions, such as those related to trauma, sometimes ensuring they have quiet time to journal helps with self-soothing.
Reading
In many cases, books can create opportunities for children to think about difficult subjects in a safer way than other activities. Books can lay out the realities of a tough emotional state in a way that makes it possible to consider that state and its repercussions constructively.
There are a lot of trauma-informed reading materials out there, including teaching resources and books appropriate for students to read. (Lee&Low) Incorporating titles from a trauma-informed reading list into school curricula creates a tool for dialogue. Children might not always know what questions to ask, or they might not know how to describe the context of their questions. However, books can inspire questions, sometimes unexpected ones. They also create a context for a focused and productive conversation.
Other Trauma-Informed Tools
Students can inform educators about how they are feeling and what they need each day with a feelings and needs poster. They simply refer to the poster by writing down one of their feelings and needs at the beginning of the day. Younger students can tap the poster to show the teacher, instead of writing it down. Order the feelings posterhere.
Additionally, it’s helpful to have a corner where students can go when they are feeling overwhelmed or just need time away. A peace corner is a place where students can empty their emotional balloons. Click here to find out how to build a peace corner.
Safe, Positive, and Encouraging Lesson Plans
Creating trauma-informed activities for students should include encouraging positive relationships and developing a safe environment. Teachers can set the tone in their classrooms by identifying strengths and by encouraging resilience through positive language–you can do it!
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