Growing Happier Children
Looking after children’s emotional development has always been important, but in today’s uncertain times it is more important now than ever.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and to recognise and comprehend the emotions of those around you. Nurturing emotional intelligence in children is key to their emotional well-being and mental health. This is a key part of their development throughout their early years and into school.
SEL, or Social & Emotional Learning, is a vitally important part of children’s schooling where they learn to socialise and manage their emotions, helping them to become more resilient, successful adults.
THE BENEFITS OF SEL PROGRAMMES
Save the Children have teamed up with the world famous SmileyWorld brand to create a range of resources for teachers to help them teach these important topics in the classroom.
The Happier Schools Project is a series of lesson plans aimed at primary school pupils, aged 7-11 years with activities designed to teach emotional intelligence (EQ), or social and emotional learning (SEL) skills.
The world famous SmileyWorld brand is all about happiness, positivity and exploring emotions and, with over 3000 icons to express any emotion or action, it is the perfect foundation for a program to help kids expand their emotional language – with Smileys we can
- Provide a shortcut to EQ learning and a platform for self-expression
- Help people to understand an emotion quickly and to express what may seem complicated to them more easily
- Create a new universal language of emotions, understandable and accessible to all, irrespective of age, language, gender, race, or religion.
The Happier Schools Project is a series of five sets of lesson plans with activities designed to teach emotional intelligence (EQ) or social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. The lessons use the CASEL framework of five core competencies around SEL and explore the 27 Key Emotions as identified by psychologist Dacher Keltner from the Greater Good Science Center. Each lesson has been designed to meet a different level of the framework.
There are a mixture of different styles of lesson marked with icons for easy identification:
We have grouped the activities in each lesson into five groups, which cover a variety of approaches to teaching to ensure that students are thinking and talking but also playing and getting creative. These are grouped in our set of Take the Time to Smile Activity Cards which encourage students to....
Teachers can select appropriate activities from the ones provided in each lesson according to how much time they have available and the needs, abilities and interests of their class. It is not necessary to complete all the activities for the lessons to be effective. The core content can be delivered digitally, using printed materials and worksheets, or in an offline manner using a board and paper notebooks where printing is not an option.
Lesson Plans
