Want to help inspire your kids?

While Discovery Education has a series of motivational videos, you might want to investigate Inspire my Kids.  Here is the review from Teachers First:

Find inspiring, age-appropriate, real-life stories, videos, and projects to share with children and teens. The site hopes to help these students take positive actions and become the best people they can be. Stories offer great examples of values like courage, determination, honesty, humility, kindness, responsibility, and tolerance. The stories range from incredible kids inspiring other kids, to amazing animals demonstrating admirable qualities, to the invention of inspirational social causes. Stories are searchable in several ways - by values, topics, age range, and format. Formats include articles, podcasts, reference, and videos. You can also sign up for the site's newsletter including updates and new article information.

SEL resources from Discovery Education

 Bridge Learning Gaps During SEL Month and Beyond

You can inspire your class to continue building SEL skills together as a team in ANY learning environment with LaGolda, an interactive, pro-social animated series + online educational program available on Discovery Education Experience. Cheer on elementary students as they explore SEL essentials with LaGolda, an awesome 8-year–old girl who travels the world making friends and learning how to overcome obstacles by successfully managing emotions. 

Lean into SEL Month in a way that helps address the challenges facing students in 2021 with a variety of collaborative, grab-and-go LaGolda resources. Incorporating SEL into your curriculum is a proven way to boost students’ overall attitudes and engagement, while increasing social skills like kindness, sharing, and empathy(1). 

Create a safe space in class for positive conversations about timely topics using hands-on LaGolda activities, which each connect to an episode in the animated series. 

• EQUITY & INCLUSION
  Do your students know what an “underserved population” is? 

• GENDER EQUALITY
  How often do students unknowingly perpetuate norms / stereotypes?

• FOOD SCARCITY
  What does food access look like in your students’ community and surrounding areas? 

SEL competency not only empowers your elementary students with greater emotional resiliency, it literally enhances overall academic outcome! Supporting students’ social and emotional development produces an 11% point gain in grades and test scores1, and SEL competency is accepted to be at least as predictive of academic and career achievement as IQ(2). 

UnitedHealthcare is committed to inspiring the healthiest generation yet by partnering with Discovery Education to make LaGolda resources available through the Discovery Education K-12 learning platform. Show students how to play the long game for a lifetime of happiness and success by building SEL essentials in any learning environment. Take your students on an uplifting animated SEL adventure today with LaGolda and friends. 

SEL Resources

 This release from Discovery Education highlights many of the SEL resources:

Discovery Education & Partners Amplify Resources for Social-Emotional Learning

Discovery Education joins communities across the world to celebrate the importance of social-emotional learning by highlighting the new Social-Emotional Learning Center available in its award-winning K-12 learning platform. The Social-Emotional Learning Center presents a curated collection of hundreds of resources designed to support educators as they integrate SEL into core instruction and to help students develop social and emotional competencies. The SEL Center is made possible in part through The Allstate Foundation’s generous support and commitment to providing innovative SEL resources for students, teachers, and school communities.

The SEL Center resources feature Discovery Education original content, content from trusted partners like the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), Inner Explorer, and Everyday Speech, as well as content created in partnership with LG Electronics USA, Wings for Kids, and RFK Human Rights. CASEL resources, including their SEL framework, support educators’ SEL implementation in the classroom. Inner Explorer provides students in grades PK-12 short, daily exercises teaching practical breathing and relaxation techniques proven to heighten awareness of senses, regulate thoughts and emotions, and develop compassion and connection. Resources from Everyday Speech include videos, activities, and worksheets encompassing multiple SEL strategies organized by each of the CASEL competencies. The SEL Center is a one-stop shop for teacher access to dynamic SEL supports and will be regularly refreshed with new resources from an expanding array of partners.

A number of the resources provided through corporate and community partners are also available to all educators and communities at no-cost, including:

Amazing Me

The Dove Self-Esteem Project and Discovery Education have teamed up to deliver the best in SEL, health, and confidence-building resources for 4th and 5th grade students. The array of new content includes 10 classroom activities, 2 new digital lesson bundles, and 2 master class videos equipping educators with the content they need to empower 4th and 5th grade students to be confident. The digital resources focus on health, social-emotional learning, and body confidence and can be found at AmazingMeSelfEsteem.com.

Discover Your Happy

The Discover Your Happy program from LG and Discovery Education equips communities with the skills necessary to reduce stress and create sustainable happiness by providing curriculum and standards-aligned resources. This year, LG Electronics USA’s Life’s Good: Experience Happiness program, alongside non-profit partners CASEL, Inner Explorer, Be Strong and the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center Greater Good Science Center, is celebrating teachers for their heroic efforts to support students during these challenging times and in particular, their focus on SEL. Together, LG, its non-profit partners and superhero teachers across the United States already have reached more than 4 million students with a science-based curriculum developed to teach happiness “super” skills to help facilitate life-long mental wellness. Learn more at learnexperiencehappiness.com.

Soar with Wings: Social Emotional Skills for School & Life

Soar with Wings: Social Emotional Skills for School & Life, powered by Wings for Kids and The Allstate Foundation, incorporates academics and fun while building social and emotional skills for students in grades K-5.

• In Your Shoes Family Activity (grades K-5): The activity provides an opportunity for families to reflect on the life changes they’ve experienced due to COVID-19 and consider how all family members have been affected in both similar and different ways.

• Focusing on Me and You Classroom Activity (grades K-2): Build social awareness and relationship skills by investigating what it means to be mindful and how the act of being present can help them better understand their own feelings and the feelings of those around them.

Teaching with Testimony

Unlock the power of testimony to counter hate with Teaching with Testimony, a program from USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Edu

cation that uses eyewitness accounts from survivors and witnesses of genocide to empower students to find their voices and act for a better future. Learn more at teachingwithtestimony.com and engage your community with:

• Stronger Than Hate Challenge (grades 7-12): Create a poem, story, video or piece of artwork that uses the power of story to counter hate for a chance to win up to $10,000 in prizes.

Find more SEL content in Discovery Education’s K-12 learning platform on the Corporate Education Partnerships channel and the Social-Emotional Learning Center.

SEL in your daily activities

 In this blog post from  Mandy Froehlich, she provides suggestions on integrating SEL opportunities in daily classroom activities.

Kindness 101- Service

Fran Maye shared this Steve Hartman video on service.  This might be something to share with your students. He has a Kindness 101 series each episode focusing on a different attribute.  Maybe share more than one and let your students select the one to view and reflect.

NEW SEL information from Discovery Education

Powering SEL Skills in Your Classroom with LaGolda

One of the most powerful SEL resources we’ve used this year is the pro-social, animated series LaGolda. LaGolda is an online educational program that focuses on 8-year-old Latina, LaGolda, who loses her parents and is shuffled from one orphanage to the next. Instead of letting these circumstances defeat her, LaGolda finds friends in her fellow orphans and they travel the world to build a better environment for other children like themselves. The animated series features six episodes that showcase diverse places and children around the world who feel like outcasts but are shown just how special they really are by LaGolda, her group of friends, and the rest of their communities.  Search for LaGolda in your Discovery Education to locate this material.

Social-Emotional Learning and DES

Sign in to your DE account and check out these new resources.

SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING: Discovery Education supports Social
and Emotional Learning (SEL) through its dynamic platform, relevant content,
robust channels, and instructional strategies. Explore and share SEL resources today.

BRINGING SEL TO LIFE: In our recent virtual field trip, we introduced students to the key pillars of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, and relationship skills. It’s not too late for you to follow these students through their day and see how they learn to better understand themselves. Watch the Archive.

I might never look at Arthur the same way!

(Image from PBS)

PBS is hosting three free one-hour webinars on Social Emotional Learning geared to P-5 educators. Please see this link for information and registration (the dates are 3/28,4/4, 4/11).  PD credit is provided.

Empathy and Design- perfect together

Can your students put themselves in someone’s shoes and try to solve a problem?  Design Thinking is a combination of Social-emotional learning and problem-solving.  This post from Discovery Education has a host of ideas and resources for any grade level.

SEL in Discovery Education

Please click here for Discovery Education resources on Social Emotional Learning.

Looking for SEL information?

Want to learn more about SEL?  There is a free webinar on Wednesday, 11/28 sponsored

by EdWeb.  They do provide a PD certificate (and if you sign up and miss the session,

they will share a link where you can view the archive, take a short quiz, and still get the credit!)

SEL and Restorative Practices: Schoolwide Integration Strategies

Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 4 p.m. Eastern Time REGISTER HERE

SEL and Sesame Street

Even though this blog post is from WriteReader, you could use their lesson plan ideas on kindness in a variety of tech (and non-tech) applications.

SEL

Are you looking for Social Emotional Learning material in the younger grades?  

Please check out the PBS resource Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

You will find stories and strategies to help your young learners.