Social & Emotional Activities
Portage Township Schools
Social and emotional learning is an important part of your child's education as it helps them recognize their emotions and make sense of the world around them. Topics in the Social & Emotional Learning Center address the needs of our students as they cope with the COVID-19 school shutdown and quarantine.
Please feel free to adjust the questions or activities in these lessons to fit your child's age and abilities.
THIS WEEK'S LESSON
Mindful Coloring
Did you know that coloring is great for decreasing anxiety and helping you relax? In 2018, the National Institute of Health (NIH) found that people who spent time doing a mindful coloring page decreased their anxiety much more than people who didn’t do the activity.
All you need are some colored pencils, markers, or crayons. There is an attached coloring page, but feel free to use a different one if you have one that you like better! Take a half hour to focus on just coloring that page. You can make it as colorful as you want, or use just a few colors. The important part is to focus on staying inside the lines, taking deep breaths, and making the page exactly how you want it to look.
If you like this activity, there are tons of free coloring pages on the internet that you can download and print. Use these when you need a break or want to relax. You can work on these alone, or with family! You could even video chat with a friend and both color your own pages. When you’re done, you’ve decreased your stress and anxiety and you have an awesome picture!
PAST LESSONS
Managing Your Anger
Coping Skills
There are two different types of coping skills - emotion-focused coping skills and problem-focused coping skills. Emotion-focused coping skills are things that distract us from the stressful or upsetting thing, for example if you got some bad news and you decide to go for a walk or call a friend to make yourself feel better. Problem-focused (also called solution-focused) coping skills are the coping skills that we use to help us figure out a way to solve the problem that is making us stressed or upset, for example if you are stressed about not understanding your math homework, you might ask your teacher for some extra help and come up with a plan to figure out what you don’t understand.
Problem-focused coping skills are specific to each individual situation, but emotion-focused coping skills can be used at any time. Below is a list of emotion-focused coping skills. Choose at least five of them that you feel would help you when you’re feeling sad, stressed, angry, or just not your best.
Exercise (run, jump rope, lift weights, etc.)
Write in a journal
Draw
Listen to music
Take a bath
Play with a pet
Spend time in nature
Clean the house (or a closet, drawer, or area)
Read a book
Meditate
Use aromatherapy
Play a game
Cook a meal or prepare a snack
Engage in a hobby
Pray
Practice breathing exercises
List the things you feel grateful for
Color
Garden
Do yoga
Reframe the way you are thinking about the problem
Use progressive muscle relaxation
Picture your “happy place”
Give yourself a pep talk
Drink tea
Squeeze a stress ball
Put on lotion that smells good
Look at landscape photos that help you feel relaxed
Think of something funny, like a joke or story
Look at pictures that remind you of the people, places, and things that bring you joy
Take care of your body in a way that makes you feel good (paint your nails, do your hair, put on a face mask, take a shower)
Smile at yourself in the mirror
Use a relaxation app
Go for a walk
Call a friend or family member on the phone
Now that you’ve picked five, find someone you trust to talk about them with. Why do you think they’d help you? When can you see yourself using these? Do some of the coping skills work best for different emotions?
Next time you aren’t feeling your best, choose one of the coping skills from this list and try to use it. We can’t always control our feelings, but we can control our actions - let’s take action to make sure we are maturely dealing with our negative emotions so that we can always feel our best!
A Lesson in Gratitude
The Journal of Clinical Psychology identifies the practice of gratitude as an activity that has many benefits for our mental health (Emmons & Stern, 2013). The importance of gratitude is often overlooked. How many times a day do we look around ourselves and consider how lucky we are to have what we have? Do you remember to say thank you to your friends and family for what they do for you? Having a family that supports you, friends that you can laugh with, a special athletic ability, or an academic talent are all things to be grateful for, and things that make our lives better.
Print out the attached worksheet and fill it out, either by yourself or with someone you trust. Spend some time today thinking about the elements of your life that you are grateful for. When we focus on gratitude about the things we have, it’s harder to be sad or upset about the things we don’t have!
Want to know more about gratitude? The article referenced in this activity can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23775470.
Mindful Media
(Read the following with your child and ask them to answer the questions.)
Just like the food we eat is fuel for our bodies, the information that we take in from the media is fuel for our thoughts. And just like some food is unhealthy and isn’t great fuel for our bodies (like that entire bag of hot cheetos), some media isn’t great fuel for our thoughts. With the chaos surrounding COVID-19, there’s tons of unhealthy media available to us right now. But don’t worry! We can learn to mindfully consume media! Next time you are watching or reading the news, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, or looking at someone’s most recent Instagram post, ask yourself these questions!
1. Is this true? We can decide if something is true in a few different ways. If this is a news article or something on TV, who wrote it? Who said it? Is it from a source that is trusted and reliable? Where are they getting their information? Would your English teacher be okay with you citing it in a paper? If it’s something about science or medicine, can we trust that the information came from real scientists or medical professionals? Usually, colleges and universities or organizations like the Center for Disease Control or World Health Organization are the best places to listen to when it comes to science and medicine. If you can’t tell if it’s true, it’s probably unhealthy media!
2. Is this helpful? Some information in the media is helpful to us and some is not. Is looking at this Instagram post going to make you feel bad about yourself? Is that person’s Facebook post going to improve your day? Are you getting some information that is important for your happiness, health and safety, or that is important for the happiness, health and safety of someone else?
3. Is this necessary? Do I need this information right now, or at all? Why?
We’ve all watched a video that isn’t giving us the full story, or read an article that probably is not true. We’ve all looked at someone’s social media post even when we know it’s not going to make us feel great. Right now, the safest place to be is at home - so our connection to the outside world is TV, the radio, and the internet. Knowing how to think about the media helps us limit our interactions to (mostly) healthy media. Use this handout to help think about what is fueling your thoughts and then discuss it with your friends, family, or anyone else who might need to take a better look at what media they’re taking in.
Together, we can get better at choosing healthy fuel for our thoughts!
(Complete the worksheet below together!)
Portage Township Schools
Email: ptscommunications@portage.k12.in.us
Website: http://www.portage.k12.in.us
Location: 6240 U.S. 6, Portage, IN, USA
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/portagetownshipschools
Twitter: @portage_schools