Character Strength of Emotional Intelligence – Instructional Strategies and Activities

The following are instructional strategies and activities to help integrate the strength of EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE into the culture of your classroom.

• Active/Attentive Listening – One way to help our students make emotional and social connections with each other is to help them learn how to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits for the age of your students. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities.
• Atlas of Emotions – The atlas is an interactive tool that builds your emotional vocabulary. One strategy is to explore this tool using your projector to show your students the five universal emotions (anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness). When you select an emotion you are taken to a graph showing the intensity of variations on the emotion. A second strategy is to share the Timeline visual which shows cause and effect when we are triggered to then experience each of the five emotions and how we might respond. Another pathway to follow is the Response visual which takes the graph of an emotion and shows possible responses. You can select each response for a description of what it looks like in action. It is definitely worth taking some time to explore this resource to come up with ways to use it!
• Do You Feel Me? – Watch videos of elementary students sharing stories. Your students then guess the emotion(s) the presenter felt.
• Drawing and Feelings – Sitting down to draw as an outlet to calm down when experiencing intense emotions and as a way to express feelings are just two ways that drawing can help students process their feelings.
• Emotion Check-Ins – Possibly add check-ins to your morning meeting. Here is one technique of many.
• Emotion Coaching – Use the steps of emotion coaching when students “flip their lids“.
• Emotional/Feelings Thermometer – Download or create your own emotional thermometer to post in your room for student to choose an emotion and their degree of feeling it. Here is a helpful lesson.
• Empathy as a Daily Habit – Offer ongoing activities such as random acts of kindness, “tuning into others“, the use of “I feel” messages, active listening (teach and model) to make empathy a part of your class culture.
• Extend Emotional Literacy – Adapt this lesson to the developmental level of your students.
• Lesson Databases – Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California – Berkeley).
• Literacy Around Emotions – Think in terms of how you work to develop literacy skills and see if there are any applications for emotional literacy and self-understanding.
• Mindfulness Activities – Design activities that help your students identify their physical and emotional states while practicing being present. Here is a video to introduce mindfulness to your students. Help students be present and aware of how they feel when interacting with others. Here is a lesson page with a few ideas. Positive Psychology provides research and a long list of activities to try in your classroom. Smiling Mind provides PDF downloads of lesson ideas for the different age ranges of our elementary school. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the PDFs.
  • Build in a few times during the day for students to stop, to be mindful and to think about their emotions. You can announce the moments or possibly use a chime at set intervals or to sound off randomly. Here is a digital chime. Choose from the many meditations for children at Insight Timer to take a longer mindful moment with your students.
  • ReachOut.com (focus on MS and HS students) provides a few apps that can help students manage their feelings of anxiety and worry. Take a look at their main app ReachOut Worry Time. They have more apps at the bottom of the page.
• Mood Meter App – Depending on the age of your students look to use paper and markers to create a class mood meter and/or individual ones for personal use. Older students can create more of an app version using digital tools. The class version can be used for the labeling of emotions, scenario role plays, emotional check ins, etc. Here is more information on the app.
• Positive Self-Talk – Review and adapt the list of activities designed for adults and children to first teach the concept to then design lessons to grow positive self-talk in your students.
• Practicing Emotional Intelligence – The article “How To Practice Emotional Intelligence” offers ten tips for your review to adapt for your classroom.
• Random Acts of Kindness – Help your students understand the impact of doing kind acts towards others. A helpful place to get resources is the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK). Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Here is a list of 45 possible random acts of kindness.
• Regulation Strategies – Adult initiated Emotion Coaching | Offer the FCW questions of “What am I feeling? (use Mood Meter) What choices do I have? What do I want? | Breath Counting (e.g., breath in count 4 then exhale count 6) Breath Shifting (e.g., one hand on our chest and the other hand on our abdomen noticing how the rise and fall with each inhale and exhale.)

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash