I’m fairly confident that most everyone would agree with me when it comes to the IMPORTANCE of SEL for kids right now. If you are new here SEL is social emotional learning ( and support ). Kids need social and emotional support now more than ever.
School closures, hearing the news reports, hearing coversations, seeing face masks everywhere and possibly not seeing grandma or grandpa for a long while. This is all so confusing for little minds.
Just in the last few years public education has shown a greater interest/need for SEL. My district hired social workers a few years ago to meet with children that were struggling or needing extra support. ( insert emoji clapping hands here )
Kids are going to need lots of praise both face to face ( via Zoom ) and in response to any work they turn in digitally ( feedback ). I’ve always said the most important thing you can do in your classroom is build relationships. That’s a little tricker to do on line but certainly can be done.
Letters in the mail, class morning meetings online, videos and more will be a good start for building those important relationships…and a step in the right direction.
One way I plan to bring a little sunshine to my students is with digital stickers. In the Spring when we were thrown into digital learning without any notice I had printed digital stickers that I taped to skewers.
I bounced around and danced the stickers around to praise a child in reading groups. If I didn’t have them handy for a session the kids would BEG for them.
These are the ones I used last year and thanks to Creating 4 the classroom – they came in clutch. You can find hers here:
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I knew that I wanted my digital stickers to be both printable and able to drop into different platforms…so these digital stickers can be placed directly on student work or in comments both on Seesaw and in Google classroom.
Here’s a short video tutorial on how to use them in Seesaw:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16RIenPrl1Lj950IULGvwAyZWpuXRgPIM/view
There are lots of themes included and fun ones with puns your students are sure to love. You can find them here
Happy teaching,
