Including SEL into your home
What is Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?
“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”
The New Jersey Department of Education has been promoting social and emotional learning to enhance the building of positive school climates and the healthy development of young people. Here are the CCC, we work to have a proactive approach to social-emotional learning (SEL), Therefore, many of your children may have begun to have SEL apart of their daily lives. With all that is happening and changing on a daily basis, SEL can help to manage and regulate the various emotions that are occurring and help to encourage an open line of communication in your home.
The video above can be used to help both you and your children learn the 4 zones of regulation.
Once you watch this video, you can then use this activity to work through it with your kids. The downloadable activity can be printed out, colored on a page or you can look at it from the computer. You would explain what each color means using the video, ie green is calm; yellow is anxious, nervous, excited or silly; red is anger; blue is feeling down.
Than you would work to put the different characters in the right color. You would include conversation pieces such as reasons they chose this zone, times that they felt that way, and when they would or had been in those zones. As this is fundamental concept, you can use this activity to build on different activities as the weeks go on.
-Emily Martin, MS
