Social-Emotional Activity Your Students Will Love!

This decade is almost in the books!  I like to create vision boards and make resolutions for the upcoming year and I also like for my students to do the same.  It’s important to me that I walk them through the process of what a goal is and how to achieve the goals they set.

 I discussed goal setting with my students and what character strengths we needed to develop in order to reach that goal.  This was the lead-in for them learning one word that would guide them throughout the goal making process.  

 You may be familiar with the One Word movement. The book One Word for Kids  (affiliate link) wasn't released until November, but I didn't want to wait.  You can read the book before completing any activities.  I will do this next school year!

The One Word movement is about picking one word that centers on your character and creates a vision for your future. We put our one word on the bracelet so we could have a constant reminder of our vision or what we want to grow.   

  My Intent is another company that has a mission to support mindfulness and intention setting for students. I'm not an affiliate for the company, I just love the mission! 

They have an educator discount that’s 50% off the regular prices!  You submit an application and they will verify that you are an educator.  

My Intent Educator

 I have a wonderful aunt who donated money for me to buy supplies this year.  This was one of the purchases I made with the donation! 

(Thank you, Aunt Alexis!)

This activity involves quite a bit of discussion.  My Intent has a quiz you can have your students take to help them discover their word.  If you go through the quiz first, you can pull out words that your students may have a hard time understanding.  I made this my first lesson. We talked about what the words meant to help scaffold the learning.  We read picture books where the characters displayed certain traits. 

After discussing the words, the students took the quiz to help generate their word.  They made a list of five words from the final quiz. 

There is a page with a list of words as well if you just want your students to pick a word, but the vocabulary lesson is very beneficial. 

Word List

I told them they had to go home and sleep on their word before committing to One Word! 😊

The next day, we wrote all about our word…what it meant to us, why it’s important, and why we picked it.  I had my students type the rough draft in Google docs and share so we could work on editing and revising as they worked.  I like this process because some of my students give up if I keep sending them back to make more edits or revisions.  I also like enabling the speech-to-text feature on Google docs.  I tell my students that writing is just talking on paper.  Using this feature helps them to see that writing is easier than they think.  

The final copy is a handwritten piece.  They get practice with using the keyboard but also continuing to develop legible handwriting. 

After the final copy is completed, we watched a short video on how to make the bracelet.  This is an activity that takes time in order for the bracelets to look nice.  Since my students come to me for 50-minute segments, I scheduled two students each day to make a bracelet.  They knew who would make their bracelet each day so there was no rushing or mistakes because of the enthusiasm and they were excited!
 

Most of my students were extremely nervous because they didn’t want to make a mistake. 

I did this with fourth and fifth grade.  You can definitely complete the activity with 2^nd or even 3rd graders, however, you may need to make the bracelet for them.