Abstract
Building Social Skills With Books is a research project under the direction of the David O. McKay School of Education’s Counseling Psychology and Special Education Department at Brigham Young University. The project currently works with local elementary schools to teach social and emotional learning through children’s literature and corresponding activities. Each lesson plan includes a book, discussion topics, and lessons for teachers to use in school classrooms and with small groups of students.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has identified five interrelated sets of cognitive, affective, and behavioral competencies critical for social–emotional learning (SEL). The bibliotherapy lessons and activity resources on this website coincide with these five competencies (further information about CASEL can be found at www.casel.org). The lessons are designed for students from preschool through elementary school. Drs. Bonnie Brinton and Martin Fujiki have contributed a number of the lessons in the competencies categories. Their lesson plans were initially developed specifically for use with children with language impairments. On the website, all of their lessons are also under the heading “Language Delay Lesson Plans.”
The five social emotional learning competencies are as follows:
Self-awareness is being cognizant of one’s own thoughts and emotions and how these affect behavior. Self-awareness also includes being optimistic and realistically confident in one’s abilities, while also acknowledging one’s weaknesses.
The goal of self-awareness lessons is to encourage students to be mindful of their own thoughts and emotions and how these affect their behavior.
Self-management is the ability to control and manage one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Self-management involves managing personal stress, planning thoughtfully, and controlling impulsive reactions. Thoughtful planning includes working on self-improvement, such as identifying and working toward personal and academic goals.
The goal of self-management lessons is to help students control and manage their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social awareness is the ability to understand others’ perspectives and to be thoughtful of others’ feelings, even when others may disagree and have differing opinions. In addition, when children are socially aware, they take into account social and ethical norms. They also look to others for support, carefully considering available and trusted supportive resources in their family, school, and community.
The goal of social awareness lessons is to help students understand others’ perspectives and being thoughtful of others’ feelings, even when others disagree and have differing opinions.
Relationship skills form the basis for friendship and positive interactions across the lifespan. Building strong relationships requires strong communication skills, such as the ability to clearly communicate and actively listen. Healthy relationships also require cooperation, negotiation, conflict resolution strategies, and the ability to resist damaging peer pressure. Relationships require give and take, such as offering help to others and asking for help when needed.
The goal of relationship skills lessons is to help students form friendships and positive interactions across the lifespan.
Responsible decision-making is the ability to carefully consider potential outcomes of our decisions, considering if a choice is safe, ethical, respectful of social norms, and if outcomes from a choice will be beneficial to oneself and others.
The goal of responsible decision-making lessons is to encourage students to carefully consider potential outcomes of decisions.
Table 1 presents the themes of the book lessons and activity resources for each of the SEL competencies. Each of the themes has lesson plans for a number of books, as well as several short videos from cartoons, movies, or Sesame Street that highlight the theme.
Although the Brinton and Fujiki lesson plans can be used to teach the SEL themes, the lessons were originally developed to teach the language skills underlying SEL:
Understanding Basic Emotions (Emotion Words—happy, mad, sad, scared, disgusted, surprised);
Understanding Complex Emotions (Emotion Words—excited, worried, jealous, shy, sorry, frustrated, lonely, confused, distressed, relieved, anxious, nervous, embarrassed);
Understanding Others’ Perspectives, How Others Feel (TOM);
Prosocial and Pragmatic Behavior; and
Language (Syntax and morphology—complex syntax with because, so, if-then).
Themes in Book Lesson Plans and Activity Resources.
The lessons were designed to facilitate children’s emotion understanding, conversational ability, and language comprehension and production skills. Informal scripts were developed for each book to help interventionists (caregivers and professionals) focus on and emphasize important concepts. For each book, concepts are listed that this book is particularly well suited to teach. These include social and emotional knowledge, interactional skills, vocabulary, and language structure. Following the list of concepts, a series of prompts are provided for each story page.
These prompts include questions, comments, and brief activities (e.g., making a facial expression in a mirror) designed to teach specific concepts. The interventionist may read the story text for each page and then present any of the prompts they feel would be most appropriate. The script is designed to be flexible and adjusted to each child’s needs. At the conclusion of the story script, a series of questions are provided to probe how well children understand and identify emotions that story characters experience.