Kindergarten and Second Grade: The Safe Side

For my final lesson with kindergarten and second grade, I showed students a video about the importance of safety. This video touches on a number of different areas: what to do if someone gets too close, what to do if someone tries to grab you, and the different kinds of people we know.

The video starts out by talking about Don't Knows: people the students do not know at all. Anyone the student has never met is a Don't Know. The video discusses what to do if a Don't Know tries to ask them for help, rings the doorbell, or gets in their personal space. It also talks about how it is okay to yell and scream and be as loud as you can if someone is trying to grab you.

The video also talks about Kinda Knows: people that students kind of know through their extracurricular activities and family friends. It spoke about the importance of never going anywhere with a Kinda Know without asking a parent's permission. The video also encourages all students to ask their parents for three safe adults they can trust in case of emergency.

Fourth Grade: Calming Down Steps

For our  final lesson in emotion management, we learned about the three Calming Down Steps:

1. Stop -- Use Your Signal
2. Name Your Feeling
3. Calm Down

We started out the lesson by having all students run in place and recite their ABCs. When I gave them the signal "freeze," they knew it was time to stop. We talked about what happened with their brains and bodies when they heard my signal. Were they still moving? (No.) How did their heartbeat feel? (Fast). Were they still saying the ABCs? (No.) My signal had caused their brains and bodies to stop, and they began to relax.

Next, we watched the Calm Down music video. After the video, we named all three videos and went back to my example where I had told them to "freeze." This was a stop signal. We talked about the other stop signals we had heard in the song: stop, chill, hang on, hold up. Next, students brainstormed a stop signal that could work for them, and they shared these signals with their neighbors. 

We discussed what had happened to Maia in last week's lesson, and what was happening in her body (it was feeling overwhelmed). We watched another video clip to see what happens with Maia when she uses calming down steps. We watched as she used several stop signals (okay, hang on, wait a minute), and named her feeling (angry). We talked about the amygdala, that only reacts, and doesn't think. We talked about how the only way to activate our cortex, or thinking part of the brain, was to use the first two calming down steps. Once we have activated the cortex, we can calm down and make better choices.

Next, we watched the final video clip where Maia uses three calming down strategies: breathing, self-talk, and counting. We watched as her body began to calm down. We practiced deep belly breathing by placing our pinkies above our belly buttons, and breathing in through our nose for three counts. As we breathed in, we made sure our hands were being pushed out by our lungs. We breathed out through our mouths for four counts as we watched our hands fall back down.

We talked about counting, and what it really does to help us. Counting buys us time and allows us to make better choices, because when we are counting we are unable to do other things like yell at someone or do something physical. We talked about different ways we can count: forwards, backwards, by 5's, 10's or 20's. We also discussed how we can count the seconds we are breathing in and out.

We ended our lesson by discussing positive self-talk and how it helps us to calm down. When we use negative self-talk, we only escalate our strong emotions, making ourselves more upset and more likely to make negative choices. By using positive self-talk, we are able to calm down and think rationally about the right choice. We are also able to put things in perspective.

Second Grade: Jobs at Home, School, and Community; A-Z Careers; Job BINGO

For our last lesson on careers, we touched on a few topics. We began the lesson with a quick review of what we had talked about last week. Next, I had each student fill out a worksheet listing three jobs at home, school, and the community that they currently have. Students shared what jobs they do in all of those settings through class discussion. Once we had finished sharing, we created a classroom list of careers from A - Z.

We ended our lesson with a game of Job Bingo. In this activity, there were no names of jobs -- only pictures.  I would name a job, and students had to look and see if they had a picture of someone doing that job on their card. Students could win by having three across or four down.

Kindergarten: When I Grow Up, Career Day

For our final lesson on careers, we started out with a review of the Career Song we had heard last week. Next, we watched an episode of Buckalope Elementary about students attending a career day. A robot took the students interests and hobbies and created a specific list of jobs that each student might be interested. Each student picked a job to research, and they presented what they learned to the class.

We talked about the career day that is coming up next month at Chinn and all of the different careers we might see. We finished up our lesson by reading "When I Grow Up" by Kim Mitzo Thompson and Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand. Students found clues for each job listed to prove that it was the right job (uniforms, tools, etc).

Fourth Grade: Introducing Emotion Management

For the next two lessons, we will be working on emotion management. We started out the lesson by talking about what emotion management means: being in control of our own emotions. We watched a video clip where students talked about strong emotions they were experiencing, and we shared whether we had ever felt any of those feelings.

We talked about why emotion management is important. When we are not in control of our emotions, we can make decisions that get us in trouble. We also talked about how emotions are not good or bad, it is only the actions we take with those emotions that can be seen as good or not so good.

Next, we watched a video about a girl named Maia. Her teacher asked the class a question, and another student overheard her answer. The student took Maia's answer and won a pencil and free A test score for answering correctly. We watched Maia become angry as the student bragged to her, and we saw the different parts of her body reacting to her angry feeling.

We talked about the physical symptoms we feel in our body, and how we experience a feeling in both our minds and bodies. We ended the lesson by thinking of a specific strong feeling and identifying what physical symptoms we experience with that feeling.

Second Grade: Career Paths and Jobordy

For our first lesson on careers, we spent some time discussing the Six Career Paths. We went over this prezi and brainstormed jobs that would go under each career path. We spent the rest of the time playing Jobordy, a job-themed version of Jeopardy where students are divided into teams and given a list of careers. Students could select a question from any of the Six Career Paths, and each time would have an opportunity to look through the list and determine which job was the right answer. The first team to buzz in would have an opportunity to guess their answer, and the team with the most points at the end of the game was declared the winner.

Kindergarten: Hobbies, Interests, and Careers

For our final lessons this year, we will be focusing on career and student safety. For our first lesson on careers, we started out with a discussion about what a career is. we watched an episode of Buckalope Elementary on Hobbies, Interests, and Careers. We talked about the differences between hobbies, interests, and careers, and why we talk about careers in kindergarten.

The video focused on how interests and hobbies can turn into our careers, or they can remain a hobby. The episode ended with this song about careers.

We spent the rest of our time reading a book called "Whose Tools are These?" In this book, students are shown different tools that are used in occupations (stethoscopes for doctors, pencils for teachers, paint brushes for artists, etc.) Students would try to guess which tools went with with job, and then we would share what these different jobs consist of.