Classroom guidance lesson

Overview of activity:  I focused on an early elementary guidance lesson dealing with personal/social development.  This lesson focuses on having students identify a variety of feelings.

Purpose:  Through this lesson students will acquire the knowledge, attitudes and interpersonal skills to help them understand and respect self and others. 

Intervention Level:  Prevention

Age group/grade:  K-2

Materials needed:  a bag, 10 note cards with names or pictures of different feelings, drawing/writing paper

Activity: 

1.       (10 minutes)   Counselor explains that 10 students will have a chance to pull a feeling from the fancy feelings bag. The student is to act out the feeling on the card. The class will have 3 tries to guess the feeling being acted out.  Students listen to the directions. Chosen students will pull a feeling from the bag, and act it out. Counselor should help students having difficulty reading card and/or thinking of acting ideas. Class guesses.  After each role-play, counselor asks students for suggestions of when people might feel that way.  Students offer examples.

2.      (2 minutes) Explain that every person has many different feelings, and not all people will feel the same way in the same situations.  This is okay because our feelings are our own…which makes them all ok.

3.      (10 minutes)  Students will be given drawing/writing paper in which they will be instructed to draw a picture that illustrates how they are feeling that day and to write a sentence explaining their feeling. 

4.      (10 minutes)  Once students have been given time to complete their drawings and sentence they can have time to share them with the class.  This can be done as a whole group or in small groups.

5.      (2 minutes)  Conclude lesson by having students discuss why it is important for people to know about different kinds of feelings.

Follow up activities with the class:  As a follow up activity on feelings I will extend this lesson.  I will have students circulate the room as music plays.   When the music is stopped, students form pairs by turning to the person closest to them. The counselor calls out a feeling (use cards from previous lesson) and the pair shares with each other a time when they have felt that way. The music starts and they circulate the room again and the process is repeated several times.  After activity students will be asked to identify similarities and differences in feelings shared.

Contingency plan:  If time is limited or if I find myself running short on time then students can complete their drawings and sentence during the next class period.  They can have time to share these at the next class as well.  If I have extra time then more students can have a turn drawing a feeling note card from the fancy feelings bag and act it out as students guess.