- Teacher: Remember our emotions?
We can show on our face,
and people will know what we're feeling?
- Lisa: We don't always recognize the impact
our emotions have on our daily experience.
And it's an important skill
to start building from a very young age.
- Student: Makes me happy, too. - Student: It makes me sleepy.
- Teacher: What?
- Lisa: Emotions are really important.
They're part of, you know, all of our interactions.
Rather than it being the teacher's job
to help all of the kids in the classroom
be able to recognize and work with their emotions,
wouldn't it be great if the students
were building that capacity themselves?
And they could do that with each other,
have conversations about it.
That's a really big piece
of this being part of the curriculum.
- We really want to teach children
that all emotions are okay.
And it's okay to feel angry,
and it's okay to feel sad,
and we can spend some time
knowing how it feels in the body.
Then, in those times
where someone is actually really feeling angry,
the child is able to self-regulate;
to identify what's happening for them.
And it can be those strong emotions.
It can also be those moments of joy.
- Man: I'm as happy as a lark.
? ?
I'm as mean as a shark.
I'm sad as a basset hound.
- Lori: So this is animal emotions.
We start naming how the animals might feel,
and then, how does it show up
when we're acting out the animals?
And so, we start identifying some of those emotions
that perhaps we can feel on the inside
just as we're pretending to be these animals.
- Lisa: You know, in many classrooms,
they're working with kids
to build the capacity to recognize
that there's such a breadth of emotions,
in addition to those good or bad or happy or sad emotions.
- Okay, how 'bout we do one more?
Ready?
Noelle!
What was that?
Surprise, right?
Are they at the bottom yet?
- Student: Not yet. - Okay, keep watching.
- Lori: The mind jar lesson is a very popular lesson.
When your mind is really full
and you feel angry or scared,
feeling really excited,
it can feel like this.
- Lisa: That's kind of like what we're like in our mind
when we're dealing with a lot of circulating,
difficult, challenging emotions or experiences.
- Lori: And so we shake up the mind jar
and...
as we notice and watch the glitter settle,
it's just like that on the inside.
- Lisa: This is how our mind can be
when we give ourselves some time to just settle down.
- Can you share your smile with Whitley?
Share your smile!
- Lisa: We learn that not only do we have emotions
and that they impact us,
but that other people have emotions too.
If another kid is able to say to a friend,
"I'm feeling really sad right now.
"I just want to be quiet."
Being able to hear that and honor that
could go a long way towards helping to have
a collaborative classroom atmosphere.
- Student: What is it?
- Student: It's okay, Noelle, we can just try again.
- Teacher: Good words!
We said, "No problem.
"Let's try again!"