Social-emotional Learning

 We believe that teaching social and emotional skills is essential for helping our students become their best selves and contributing members of society.  This work is a key part of how we live our mission to “value the uniqueness of all and ensure the highest levels of learning.”  To learn more, here is a brief video overviewing our approach at East Prairie.

Our first unit on emotions is complete, and it was a wonderful success!  We spent the past five weeks focused on a student-friendly goal of “I can show kindness and respect diversity.”  To do this, we focused on utilizing community circles, a powerful and practical tool for building connection and student voice.  These daily routines are helping us create a safe space for meaningful conversations, which in turn builds deep trust and respect among our students.

We are now moving into our second SEL unit for the year, which is all about community, climate, and safety!  The student-friendly goal for this unit is “I can persevere through challenging situations.”  To get there, we'll be creating a Class Charter together that will outline how we want our classroom to feel and the behaviors needed to make that happen.  We'll also continue to utilize community circles.  The ultimate goal of all our work is to help our students learn these important skills and use them in their daily lives.

5 Core Competencies of Social-Emotional Learning

As with all of our work, we'll continue to share information and resources with our families.  The more we work together, the more we can achieve for our kids - and that's what this is all about.