Emotional Education Activities. (Unit 1. Pedagogy)

 

      The emotional education is related to the development of the personality during the childhood and the adolescence, influenced by the custom or by the society in which we live. 

       It is important to learn some aspects that are useful for us when we want to make a decision or to express feelings, messages or emotions with our body or with our face without using words. It is a very important part because we can know what is feeling another person when we look at his/her face or for example when we want to say how we feel in this moment to a deaf person. 

    In this project we want you to know some important parts of the emotional education. It is a nice project because reflects how children can learn really important things through a game. 

         To work with expressing feelings, we will teach to our pupils some activities such as feelings’ bingo. In this activity, pupils will learn to identify their reactions to different situations and they will value if their reactions are the best or not. This is an activity to children in the last courses of primary school.

The objectives of this activity are: representing feelings and emotions by mimic, recognize situations in which pupils can feel different feelings and favouring a climate of trust between pupils.

They will use cardboards to play bingo in which the squares are the names of the different feelings and emotions.

Each pupil has a cardboard. When the teacher gets a word of the pomp, pupils have to represent the feeling or emotion and then check if they have it in their cardboards.

When a pupil say linea, she or he has to ask to other classmate to represent the situation of her or his cardboard, and when someone say bingo, she or he has to tell a story with the feelings that he or she has.

          It’s important to learn to search for solutions when we’re living a difficult situation. 
The next activity can be useful to help students to be positive in any situation.

The name of the activity is “Harder Still”. It is for first grade students.

The teacher divides the class in two groups and explains a difficult situation to one group and its members have to find a solution for the situation. The other group has to complicate the situation. The group that solve the whole problem, wins.

For example: The teacher proposes this situation to one group: You have broken your mother’s favourite mug although she always told you not to touch. What do you do? Depending on the answer the other group complicates the situation. If they answer: “We think that we would tell it to her”, then the other group can say: “But if you tell it to her, she won’t you let go to the party on Saturday”.

They have to find a solution for all the situations.

          For Non Verbal communication we can find a great variety of activities, such as the one that I'm going to explain later, that is call "Guess” that is for first degree pupils.

It is important to learn how to interpret what the gestures say to us, to learn to decipher messages with nonverbal communication. The Web Andujar Guidance propose to us a fun game to teach students to appreciate the gestures and to discover their meaning.

          This game consist on write in a paper different actions, and then divided the class into two team. So one group have to pick one and represent it, to his/her group and they have to guess it in a minute, if not, the turn pass to the other team.

When they guess the action they will win a point for the team, and at the end the winner is the team that have more points.

 We not always get understand what others communicate to us. For students to work the proper interpretation of his classmates’ messages we suggest this simple activity called “Repeat what I say”, that is suitable for first grade pupils.

The main objectives of this activity are:

-To encourage active learning attitude.

-To learn to clearly express verbal messages.

-To understand that feedback is an essential part of communication.

To develop the activity, children will be grouped in pairs and we say to them that they are going to dialogue in a special way. Children will talk about the topic that they prefer, but before answer to his partner message the pupil has to repeat it in order to demonstrate that he has listened to him. If he has fully understood it, his partner has to nod and so on.

After that, we all talk about how has been our feelings while we was dialoguing, if we have been fully understood and if we have been able to listen carefully.

Finally, we will explain what actively listening means. We ask pupils to remember situations where they have heard but they haven’t actively listened and why they acted in that way. Also they have to remember situations where they felt that they haven’t been listened.

It is very important that children develop verbal communication skills fully and correctly.

The effective communication occurs when the receiver gets the message that the issuer tries to transmit with the least possible distortion. So when we issued a message, we must express ourselves in a way that can be understood by the receiver and when we heard we must be attentive to what transmits the other.

To achieve this, an easy and fun way is the activity of The Labyrinth, which we developed in second cycle.

Through this fun game, students will learn to transmit messages clearly and to interpret them properly. In this activity, they will discover how many times we don´t express clearly or we don´t know how to listen.

The objectives of this activity are:

• Know how to express instructions clearly.
• Be aware that communication always needs to exchange information.
• To interpret oral messages transmitted to us.
• To foster trust between classmates.

We need duct tape and it would be appropriate to do this activity in the gym or in the playground.

          We create a class tour of sticking duct tape on the floor.

We asked for two volunteers, to one we will cover the eyes with a handkerchief and the other should indicate to his partner what way has to follow to get to end of the tour. The student, who don´t see, can’t walk on the duct tape and neither can’t speak. The child who gives the instructions must be very clear for what his partner doesn´t get out of the way.

Then other two students, but in this case, who has covered his eyes, can talk and ask tracks to his partner. We can make the game more difficult by putting obstacles in the way as chairs or books.

Finally, we will comment with students the differences that have found between the two situations.

All of the activities that are explained in this topic are for primary students and it's so nice to know that they can enjoy playing this types of games because they spend so much time doing things that aren't important or useful in their lifes, but with this kind of activities, they can enjoy with their friends while they're learning how to express feelings or learning how to communicate something to a mate using the correct gestures.

Here you have a link that can help you to understand better the concept of emotional education. It is in spanish so it can help to your understanding.

Bisquerra, Rafael. (2010). Aprender a Pensar. Sentir y Pensar: WordPress. Recovered from: http://sentirypensar.aprenderapensar.net/2010/11/18/el-concepto-de-la-educacion-emocional/

Finally, here there are some questions related to the topic.

      Thanks for reading! If you want to say something about the topic that can be interesting or if there is something that you want to know, you can leave me a comment or you can send me an email to this address: albialbita@outlook.es.