Middle school is a time in life when emotions run wild and free. It's also the perfect age to help students recognize, name, experience, and accept the wide range of emotions that they face each day.
Here are 22 activities that can help your middle school students get in touch with their strong feelings, even without detailed lesson plans. You can work them right into whichever lessons you're already teaching that day!
1. Emotional Vocabulary List
This list goes way beyond the basic vocabulary of "happy" and "sad" to help kids give more precise and reasoned explanations of their feelings. By introducing this emotional vocabulary early on in the school year, you can prepare your middle schoolers to talk about their feelings in everyday situations.
Learn more: Tom Drummond
2. Interactive Online Emotion Cards
This online activity helps kids identify facial expressions and descriptions of emotions. It is interactive, and it's a great starting point to get students talking about everything from fun times to difficult feelings.
Learn more: Therapist Aid
3. Classroom Yoga
When things get emotional or stressful in the classroom, classroom yoga is a great way to help your students come back to their centers. Try out these simple poses and breathing exercises; some of them can even be done while the students stay at their desks!
Learn more: Class Yoga Kids
4. Mindfulness Calendar
This resource focuses on daily doses of mindfulness to help kids practice emotional control for at least 5 minutes every day. It includes a variety of quick activities that you can use at the beginning, middle, or end of class to bring students back to the center.
Learn more: Mentally Healthy Schools
5. Emotional ABCs Curriculum
This curriculum is research-based and designed to help students name and face their challenging emotions. Each color monster guides the middle schoolers through different kinds of emotions. Each lesson about emotions also features assessment tools and practice.
Learn more: Emotional ABCs
6. Focus on Perspective
Whenever you're reading a book, watching a movie, or exploring different character education activities, use it as a chance to practice perspective taking. This means that you should encourage students to think about life from the perspective of the characters in the book or movie. Have them use their emotional vocabulary to try to identify and explain the feelings of any character.
Learn more: Book Units Teacher
7. The Emotion Wheel
This tool is helpful in identifying and explaining everything from normal to extreme emotions. It's a tool that is used by psychologists, and simplified versions are a great way to help middle school students start talking about their feelings and naming the correct emotion that they're feeling.
Learn more: Practical Psychology
8. Anxiety Thermometer
This printable emotion anxiety worksheet enables students to identify and explain the level of anxiety they feel in certain situations. This can be helpful in times when students are presenting extreme emotions or inappropriate behavior; it can also take you to the root cause of these issues.
Learn more: Mentally Healthy Schools
9. Identifying and Labeling Emotions
This handy list of discussion starters and activities can be easily worked into any lesson plan. They're also great to have in mind in the case of emotional outbreaks or inappropriate behavior in the classroom since they're geared towards regulating students' emotions in real-time.
Learn more: Susan Fitzell
10. Understanding Anxiety
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This video is a great way to introduce the topic of anxiety and to de-stigmatize some of its causes and symptoms. It dives into the fight or flight behaviors, and it gives a clear and level-appropriate description of what anxiety is and how to react to it.
Learn more: Anxiety Canada
11. Healthy vs. Unhealthy Coping Strategies
This tool enables classroom guidance lessons that target the different ways that students can cope with stress or negative emotions. It does a great job identifying unhealthy coping mechanisms while training and promoting healthy ones.
Learn more: Mentally Healthy Schools
12. Setting SMART Goals
The affective element of education has been shown to be linked to goal-setting and attainment. So, an important step in emotional regulation in an academic setting is having good goals. This video explains how middle school students can set and achieve SMART goals.
Learn more: 2 Minute Classroom
13. Resilience Board Game
This board game has students using game cards to talk about their feelings in everyday and difficult situations. It's also a great tool for promoting empathy through group work and interactive games in the classroom.
Learn more: Mentally Healthy Schools
14. Building Self-Esteem
This resource features six activities that can improve self-esteem among middle school students. Higher self-esteem can lead to a better understanding of their own emotions, as well as better academic achievement.
Learn more: Pinterest
15. Deep Breathing Exercises
This video is a quick introduction to an easy breathing exercise that your students can utilize in any situation, including in the middle of class! It goes through the key steps for getting a good deep breath, including the inhale breath and exhale breath patterns for maximizing control and focus.
Learn more: Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Strong4Life
16. Empirical Underpinnings
This article and interview help teachers understand the role and importance of emotional resilience in middle school students. It's so much more than just classroom management: students' emotional intelligence also has a huge impact on their learning and achievement!
Learn more: Resilient Educator
17. The RULER Approach
This curriculum is designed to help students identify and regulate their big and small feelings alike. It's based on strong research and years of planning, with input from some of the top experts in the field.
Learn more: Westport PS
18. Kindness Bingo
This game is a great way to inspire simple acts of kindness and empathy from your middle school students. It also gives practical and actionable examples of ways that students can apply their emotional intelligence.
Learn more: Pinterest
19. Integrating Social-Emotional Learning
These tools will help you guide students through social settings where they will participate in the social regulation of their emotions. This means that they will become aware of the ways that their actions and reactions impact the social-emotional space that they share in the classroom.
Learn more: The Pathway 2 Success
20. Games for Emotional Regulation
This video details five great games to help your middle school students master emotional regulation. It is also a great way to promote open and honest communication about your students' emotions.
Learn more: Kreative Leadership
21. What's Under the Anger?
This handy chart gives a lot of different reasons that a student might feel angry, and it's a great jumping-off point for helping middle schoolers identify the source of their anger in a given situation.
Learn more: Pinterest
22. Coping Strategies Wheel
This hands-on craft results in a tool that gives students lots of healthy coping tools. The wheel features different ways that students can cope with negative emotions or stress, and it's a great reminder of these skills throughout the school year.
Learn more: The Pathway 2 Success
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