Make Time to Teach Social-Emotional Learning Every Day: 5 Simple Strategies!

Learn five simple, yet effective strategies to help you make time to teach social-emotional learning in the K-5 classroom daily, even with a busy schedule!

5 Manageable Ways to Teach SEL Daily

It’s no secret that teachers have a lot of responsibilities. There is an enormous amount of curriculum content to cover in the core subjects, like math, reading, and science. But the responsibilities don’t end there. There are classrooms to organize and run and children to manage. This doesn’t leave us much time for anything else—or does it?

Social-emotional learning involves teaching the whole child. It focuses on developing a child’s social skills and emotional awareness. While we may not have a lot of time to devote to teaching SEL, it is vital that we put on our thinking caps and find the time and space for this content in our classrooms.

This post will inspire you to take action in essential ways in your limited time. Using these tips, you will no longer struggle with being “too busy” or having insufficient time to teach SEL daily.

So, let’s get creative together and learn simple ways to teach social-emotional learning (SEL). You will learn how effective planning and rethinking “classroom management” can help you be more intentional with SEL. Similarly, you will discover ways to integrate SEL into morning meetings and core content to create student engagement, making these strategies possible.

Table of Contents

• 5 Manageable Ways to Teach SEL Daily
  • Why is it important to teach social-emotional learning each day?
• Reimagine Your Classroom Management
  • Strategies:
• Have a Daily Morning Meeting
  • Steps:
• Integrate SEL with Core Content
  • More Examples:
• Use Student-Centered Strategies
  • Strategies:
  • Teach Social-Emotional Learning with this Resource
• Free Social-Emotional Learning Ebook
• More SEL Teaching Strategies

Why is it important to teach social-emotional learning each day?

Before discussing the strategies that make teaching daily SEL simple, we must recognize its importance for our classroom communities and students.

Before children can be successful in school, they need to have their basic needs met. They must be fed, warm, clothed, and feel cared for and accepted. If a child lacks these basic needs, they won’t be able to perform at their best in academic areas. Likewise, if a child cannot express their emotions in healthy ways or participate in activities with peers, they will struggle at school.

Steps:

1. Sit with your planner or timetable. Decide on a time to teach social-emotional learning exclusively or when you will integrate it into your core instruction.
2. Physically write it down. If you photocopy your timetable, make sure to have a dedicated block labeled ‘SEL’ where you can write down the topic and details of your lesson.
3. Commit to it. This may sound simple, but trust me, when you get busy, you may think that it is an area that can be pushed to another day, or forgotten altogether. Once you commit to it and make it part of your routine, you will find it easier to stick with it.
4. Reflect and make necessary changes. After you teach social-emotional learning a few times during dedicated blocks of time, ask yourself how it’s going and if any changes are needed. Maybe students could benefit from the lesson earlier in the day, or after a transition. Perhaps they could use a lesson each day, rather than once or twice a week.

Reimagine Your Classroom Management

Classroom management is not about getting kids to behave properly. It shouldn’t involve forcing kids to conform to rigid rules or unreasonable demands that diminish their creativity and individuality.

Classroom management should be about running a classroom built on mutual respect, cooperation, and responsibility. It’s about encouraging students to participate in the school to make a community where everyone has a voice and feels important. This is where social-emotional learning and classroom management intersect.

We need to reimagine classroom management. This mindset shift is where we understand that by focusing instead on our students’ social and emotional development, we build routines and procedures that help our classrooms run effectively.

Strategies:

• Establish rules, procedures, and expectations with your students. This will set the tone for the rest of your year together and ensure everyone feels heard.
• Teach and practice healthy ways of communicating. Roleplay taking turns, asking questions, sharing, and listening.
• Catch students being responsible or making good choices and reward them with a compliment or a kind note. Verbal recognition is powerful and intrinsically motivating. Encourage students to do the same with their peers.
• When a difficult situation occurs, use it to practice the strategies you have taught or to introduce a new social-emotional concept explicitly. Share mindfulness tools, vocabulary, and strategy posters to help kids self-regulate and solve problems.

Have a Daily Morning Meeting

You are likely already spending time working closely with your students first thing in the day, but are you also building their social and emotional skills?

By incorporating social-emotional learning into a morning meeting, you can effectively connect with students, set a positive tone for the day, and transition into learning.

Morning meetings are fun! Kids love to spend time together, so anything that feels less like schoolwork and more like play makes school more enjoyable. Greeting, sharing, and performing activities with peers build community and help kids get to know one another better.

Steps:

1. Dedicate the first 15 minutes of your day to having a morning meeting. Write it down and schedule it into your day.
2. Begin by modeling the steps of a morning meeting for your students. Clearly explain and set the expectations for a meeting.
3. Practice greeting one another in different ways. Talk about which of your students’ preferred ways to greet one another and why.
4. Spend a few minutes asking questions that encourage kids to share about themselves. This is an excellent opportunity to build connections!
5. Create short activities that build specific social or emotional skills. For example, introduce a new breathing strategy to help themselves calm down, or write a kind note and give it to someone.
6. Then, wrap up your meeting by transitioning into your next lesson or finish by reading a children’s story that connects to the SEL concept of the day.

Integrate SEL with Core Content

Social-emotional learning instruction does not need to occur separately from ELA and math instruction. There are many ways to integrate them to save time and significantly impact your lessons!

You are likely already reading books to your class each day. You are weaving ELA and SEL together by selecting, reading, and discussing books that focus on social or emotional topics. Books where children can see characters having and solving problems, practicing self-management, and building relationships will help them make connections and learn strategies and solutions to their problems. Books help us teach complex topics and illustrate them in creative, helpful ways.

In math, children need effective ways of communicating their thinking, working through problems, and persevering through complex tasks. Math provides all of these opportunities! When we structure our math block to include partner work, independent practice, and whole-group activities, we offer many opportunities for children to develop social-emotional skills and perform math tasks successfully.

More Examples:

1. Design a book study based on a social-emotional learning book. Have students complete a character analysis, describe the problem and solution, and make connections. Try roleplaying the actions of a character!
2. Journal writing is an excellent way for children to reflect on their experiences. Guide them to write about specific SEL topics as they relate to their own lives. It’s also a great idea to have children write about a story you have read, by following a provided prompt or writing their opinion after a story.
3. Like math, science provides opportunities for students to face and overcome challenges, try new things, and work with peers. Science may bring excitement, surprise, or frustration, which is valuable for kids as they need to learn to work through different feelings in school!
4. Kids need math tools to learn new concepts effectively. Learning to share tools and use them to demonstrate learning takes practice and patience. Presenting math problems for students to work through allows children to think critically, try new things, and make mistakes—all valuable ways of building social and emotional skills!

Use Student-Centered Strategies

You need student-centered practices in your classroom to increase engagement and build social-emotional skills. For example, student engagement strategies give students ownership and responsibility for their learning. These take time to develop but effectively increase student motivation to learn. When kids feel like they have an impact in the classroom and enjoy being there, their focus, effort, and output will likely increase.

Strategies:

1. Get kids involved in their learning in active ways. Provide opportunities for active participation, such as coming up to write on the board, acting out stories, and using hands-on ways of practicing concepts. Further, students can design activities to complete or help teach the class what they have learned.
2. Encourage cooperative learning with peers throughout the day. Students should have opportunities to work with others on projects and assignments. Also, provide ways for kids to work towards common goals, such as working well together and demonstrating teamwork to earn a whole-group reward.
3. Add elements of gamification to your routines. By adding bits of fun and games into your teaching, students will be hooked on learning and participating. There are great ways to combine games into social-emotional learning, such as earning points for showing responsibility or participating in challenges that build a growth mindset.
4. Provide opportunities for students to have a choice in their learning. For example, brainstorm topics for a project together, and allow students to select their topic and partner to work with.

Teach Social-Emotional Learning with this Resource

Free Social-Emotional Learning Ebook

The FREE Guide for Teachers offers nine ways to transform your classroom with social-emotional learning. It is filled with actionable tips and strategies, insightful ideas to get you started, and free printable templates and activities you can use in your classroom immediately!

More SEL Teaching Strategies

Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum

Social-Emotional Learning Resources

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