Teachers have long known that feeling safe and secure in school helps students focus their energy on learning. And the research bears that out: A 2018 study found that when teachers deliberately foster a sense of belonging by greeting each student at the door of the class, they see “significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behavior.”

This post outlines ideas from teachers for ensuring that every student in the classroom feels like they belong.

Some of the activities included take less than five minutes. They’re divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade.

"This resource packages up 15 SEL intervention ideas from Panorama's expert SEL curriculum partners—complete with "how to" instructions and templates for use. These low-lift, actionable strategies can help rebuild community, foster positive relationships, and assist students in navigating complex emotions."

You will have to provide your information to download the packet.

Example Interventions (Instructions Included!):

✔ 2x10 Relationship Building
✔ Empathy Exercise
✔ Feelings Journal
✔ Rose, Bud, Thorn
✔ Home Visits Protocol
✔ Cooldown Process

Writing prompts for kids help students:
- Express themselves and their creativity
- Grasp lifelong literacy skills and concepts
- Tell their own stories and build self-confidence
- Develop a growth mindset when it comes to their writing skills
- Writing is like a muscle — it takes practice to build up skills. Luckily, we put together a list of over 200 writing prompts to help your students get started.

Contents include:
- Creative writing prompts
- Fun writing prompts
- Persuasive writing prompts
- Social emotional learning journal prompts
- Math writing prompts

A student’s sense of belonging can come from connections with both peers and adults. This downloadable guide includes five strategies for building strong relationships with students and creating a positive school culture where everyone feels they belong.

*Activities & Templates are provided!

"Whether your little one is at home or at school, there are lots of ways to support her social and emotional learning. Here are some things you can do to cultivate those skills within her."

Explore eight different SEL strategies for use in the classroom or small group settings (including instructions for implementation!).

Small changes to test prep — and the day of the big test — can reap huge rewards. Learn about these brain-friendly strategies that work.

Cognitive science — the study of thought, learning and mental organization — tells us a lot about getting students primed to succeed on tests.

This resource outlines some practices that can help as you approach tests — and even on the day of the test:
1. Use retrieval to lock learning in long-term.
2. Mix up question types with interleaving.
3. Instead of cramming, space out practice.
4. Happiness is powerful.
5. Time of day matters.
6. Soak up the sun.
7. Breaks are essential.
8. Get up and move, move, move.

This site has a series of pre-made free lesson plans that are ready to teach right away. MATH, ELA, SCIENCE, SEL, CAREER, ART, DIGITAL LITERACY, TECH, STEM

They have clips of popular movies and TV shows built right in - and you are allowed to use them bc the site is made by AT
&T and Warner Bros.

"The Achievery helps connect students to a new world of digital learning through stories that spark curiosity and content that entertains as well as teaches."

Don't miss checking this one out! You can use the filters to find exactly what you need.

Copy and paste this url into a browser to watch a short 1 min intro video - https://youtu.be/w-y0u82ps3o

You will have to sign up to access the lessons but it's totally worth it.

"Covid is restricting our lives, but we can find new ways to keep making progress. Trying out new things can actually boost our well-being. When we open up to new ideas, it helps us stay curious and engaged. It can also bring a sense of accomplishment and help to boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are so many ways to learn new things and this month we're encouraging everyone to find new and creative ways to overcome our frustrating situations."

Be Good People is an incredible health and social emotional learning resource that follows 5 themes: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making.
Each section comes with more than 10 lessons or extension activities that help you address these themes with your students.

This resource has content for kindergarten through grade 12.

Made by Minnesota Educators
Educators at the St. Croix River Education District in rural Minnesota.

Select the student behaviour to begin. Then you will work through a series of descriptions and suggestions for what you can do to help that student.

You can look at interventions for Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.

Each intervention suggested for a behaviour is then "clickable" and more information is provided on why to use this intervention, and how to do it.

This site is amazing!

This is a fabulous list of 21 books to teach students about everything from self-regulation to patience.

These books would be a wonderful addition to any classroom library or library and would be excellent as read-aloud stories for students, followed by discussion.

These books are all connected to 21st century skills - especially self management or character/self-regulation.

Calm Kids plants seeds of mindfulness for a life balance, confidence, and calm. This site offers videos that introduce students of all ages to the concepts of using meditation, mindfulness and breathing exercises to improve concentration and their sense of calm.

Character Playbook is an innovative digital course that uses engaging strategies to educate students about cultivating and maintaining healthy relationships during their critical middle school years. Comprised of six lessons that cover key concepts around positive character development, social-emotional learning (SEL), and building healthy relationships, Character Playbook allows students to engage with real-world scenarios, including examples of bystander intervention, resolving conflicts, effective communication, and positive relationships.

This Course Covers
Analyzing Influences
Understanding & Managing Emotions
Communicating Effectively
Resolving Conflicts
Stepping In
Making Decisions

"Four units of lesson plans created for you with fact sheets that can be printed in PDF format, activities to engage in with your students, original videos of people sharing their stories for your classrooms, grading rubrics, critical learning strategies, and even a book club created through Indigo.

Help your students:
• Examine the concept of stereotype.
• Understand how assumptions can lead to stereotypes and unfair judgments about individuals and groups.
• Recognize the ways that stereotypes and biases affect everyone.
• Teach your students to stand up to name-calling and bigotry.
• Learn how to stop the cycle of hatred and bullying
• Learn to be real-world heroes."

Brochure describing the program: https://www.chooseyourvoice.ca/wp-cyv/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Choose-Your-Voice-Brochure2022.pdf

Curriculum links for Grades 6-9: https://www.chooseyourvoice.ca/wp-cyv/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SK-Curriculum-Links-Gr.6-9.pdf

Colours have the power to make us think and feel different emotions. This assignment allows students to dive into the psychology of colours. 

Toolkits are available for:

*Lifelong Learning: A Social & Emotional Learning Toolkit for Educators

*Beyond Fake News: A News & Media Literacy Toolkit for Educators

*Teachers' Essential Guide to Cyberbullying Prevention

*Common Sense on E-rate and CIPA: A Toolkit for Schools and Districts

*Girls, Boys, and Media: A Gender and Digital Life Toolkit

Introduce core SEL competencies to teach students how to practice compassion and empathy, identify emotions, and exercise growth mindset.

Compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases a student's sense of wellbeing and improves the learning environment for all learners. By developing empathy in children, educators lay the groundwork for long-term understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion in the classroom(opens in new tab) and in life. Compassion education is important(opens in new tab) because it helps to build key social-emotional learning competencies, such as:

- development of the understanding of self
- social awareness, and
- relationship skills

With interactive online activities and robust offline lesson plans, The Compassion Project provides invaluable resources for teaching empathy in the classroom. The Lower Elementary Compassion Course has three online lessons; Compassion Playground, EmpathEyes, and Mindful Maze.

Sun West School Division: To access The Compassion Project: Lower Elementary, log into EVERFI through your clever account.

"The Compassion Project is a web-based learning platform focusing on social and emotional learning (SEL) strengths like compassion and empathy. It begins with a tutorial, which students can always access by clicking the help button in the upper left corner. Each lesson starts with a pre-quiz to assess what students already know. After that, a bright and colorful two-minute video with cartoon characters describes the topic for the lesson. Four characters (Tye, Brandon, Alex, and David) narrate the videos in story format. After the video plays, there are reflection questions in the format of a text messenger app that students can click to answer. Characters introduce the SEL skills by describing what the skill (e.g., compassion) looks, sounds, and feels like.

Each skill has three activity lessons. For compassion, students identify when someone needs help and learn how to act with kindness. For empathy, students "see" life through the perspective of different characters. For mindfulness, students practice a breathing technique. Teachers can then provide debriefing and offline extension activities.

The teacher dashboard allows instructors to manage students, add classes, and re-teach when needed. Quiz grades are automatically uploaded and students can access their score by hovering over each lesson." (Common Sense Media)

Sun West School Division: To access The Compassion Project: Upper Elementary, log into EVERFI through your clever account.