Social Emotional Learning in the Wonder Primes

Spring is such an exciting time in the Wonder Primes classroom!  The children have grown and changed so much since their first days at the Center School, and the skills that once needed to be developed are being practiced and perfected each day.  A large part of our springtime curriculum focuses on deepening social emotional learning and, for the youngest Center School students, this work begins with increasing their ability to identify emotions, when they are feeling them, and name the feelings of others. Diane Alber’s “spot books” have been a helpful and age appropriate guide for this learning.  We have been reading the “A Little Spot, My First Emotions” board book and “A Little Scribble Spot; A Story About Colorful Emotions,” since the new year.  The board book has been helpful in teaching us about the subtle differences between emotions, such as that “happy” can also be exciting or silly, while “peaceful” can be happy as well as relaxed or calm.  Students have learned to identify a color for the different emotions they are learning about and have started identifying emotions in this way.  We have heard students saying that their friends are “yellow” when they are happy or “blue” if someone is sad.  Connecting color to a bigger social emotional concept has helped the students remember and understand the emotions in a different way.  In addition to reading the books, we have engaged in drawing projects connecting what we have read to ourselves.  Students were asked to pick a spot color for a game board that we made that was inspired by a picture in the board book where the emotions are laid out in a circle. The students worked hard to color their “spot” and then the Wonder Primes teachers collected pictures of the students with various emotional expressions to correspond to their spot color in order to strengthen their understanding of the relationship of these emotions to themselves. Once the game board was completed, we spent time “playing” with different emotions by taking turns spinning to different pictures of our classmates and their emotions, and followed this with conversations about when we might feel specific feelings.  Some children said they felt mad (red) “when my body gets hurt” and “when a friend takes a toy.”  All agreed that they felt happy (yellow) when they were with their grownups and showed us how they express when they are feeling sad (“I lie down like this”). 

In addition to our game board, the Wonder Primes made emotions drawings inspired by the book, “The Scribble Spot.”  This book talks about how different emotions make us feel and how different spot colors draw their feelings.  For example, the “Happy Spot” scribbles sunshine and flowers, the “Sadness Spot” scribbles gloomy clouds and tear drops, and the “Peaceful Spot” scribbles trees and vines.  Students in the Wonder Primes were invited to draw their own emotions drawings based on their choice of emotions on that day.  They picked an emotion and carefully studied the Spot books before drawing their picture.  Some students talked about their drawings and tried to create the images they saw in the Spot books, such as “clouds and rain.”  Others drew from their own experiences, such as drawing “thunder” and identifying that they felt “scared” during a storm. 

Students in the Wonder Primes were also offered a black and white photo of themselves that matched the colorful picture on our feelings wheel to color with tempera sticks while discussing how they felt in the picture.  This component was provided as an additional way to visually reinforce that these social emotional concepts are often expressed through facial expressions and body language, as well as to help solidify their learning about these concepts in a multi-modal way. 

The Spot books have been an inspiring resource for our students and teachers and have helped the Wonder Primes gain a deeper understanding of how they feel and how others feel.  We have seen this learning put into action as the children move through their days as they are now more easily able to identify their own feelings, as well as the feelings of their peers and grown ups.  We also noted how “happy” and “confident” the children appeared as their work was displayed in our Museum exhibit for our entire community to see.  As their teachers, we are so impressed with how these young children tackled the learning and understanding required of these complex ideas!