Social Emotional Learning in Kindergarten

The beginning of the year is all about building a classroom community! Teachers spend a lot of time during the first few weeks on ‘get-to-know-you’ activities. These early weeks are also the perfect time to include some social emotional learning lessons.

In kindergarten, social emotional learning is the perfect way to help young learners understand and express their feelings appropriately. They will experience so many new things during their first school year. New social interactions, new academic material that they’ve never seen, and more. They will need language for the new feelings they are having about peers, themselves as learners, and more. This is where social emotional learning comes in!

Normalize Big Feelings

A great place to start any SEL discussion is with feelings. Everyone has feelings, and this may be the first time your students will hear a teacher talk about what to do with their feelings when they have them. Name all of the different emotions your students will encounter throughout the year. Share stories of times that they may have felt these feelings before. Discuss scenarios where these feelings will come up again during the school year. Naming and normalizing the emotions will ensure that each of your students feels at home in your classroom, no matter what they are feeling.

Discuss What to Do with Emotions

After naming and giving examples of emotions, it’s important to teach students what to do next. If they feel angry, what strategies can they use to calm down before acting out? If they feel sad, what strategies are available to self-soothe? If they are excited, how do they re-focus their energy on school? There are so many different strategies we can teach our students to help them manage their big feelings!

Keep the Conversation Going

Social Emotional Learning discussions can start right away during the school year, but we don’t want to let them stop there. Keep the conversation going all year long! Create a routine during your morning meeting, or after a particularly high-energy part of your day (like coming in from recess) to discuss some SEL strategies. You need to have the same conversations about the same feelings/strategies over and over again to allow it to sink in. Make time to foster SEL growth in your students, and your classroom community will be better off!

Social Emotional Learning with Digital Slides

As a part of my Digital Day in K resource, I have SEL slides about learning and managing emotions built right in! This product includes everything you need to kick off the beginning of the year, and it’s all digital! We will all (most likely) be returning to school in person this year, but no-print and prep digital resources are still valuable. You can project these SEL slides, have discussions with your students, and not have to prepare a single thing! Grab your set here!

Happy teaching!