To continue our unit on empathy, this week we are focusing on how people can have the same or different feelings about something. We started out our lesson with another round of Mrs. Brumitt Says, but this times students had to listen for whether I said to do "the same thing" or "something different" from what I am doing. Next, we reviewed where we can look for feelings clues: face, body, our words and how we say them, and the situation. We listened to The Feelings Song and sang along while doing the corresponding movements that go with the song.
We spent the rest of the lesson talking about two girls who were starting their first day at school: Sally and Louisha. We watched a video that showed how they were feeling along with several other students. Next, we talked about what was the same for the two students: both were girls, they go to the same school, it was the first day of school for both of them. Next, we talked about what was different: they had different colored hair, different colored dresses, different colored backpacks, and different feelings about going to school.
We used our feelings clues to tell how each student was feeling. Louisha was feeling happy and excited, but Sally was feeling scared and nervous. We talked about how their feelings were different, and why it is okay to have different feelings. We ended our lesson by doing an activity where pairs of students had to stand back to back and use their faces and bodies to show how they were feeling about a situation. The pair would turn to face the class, and the rest of the students would guess how they are feeling and whether they had the same or different feelings.
