Integrating SEL in the Garden

EASY WAYS TO INTEGRATE SEL

Mindfulness Activities for Working Memory & Stress Reduction

• Visualization / Guided Meditation

• Noise isolation: There are a variety of sounds that We hear when we are in our gardens, from bird calls to cars or trains passing by. Have your participants focus on one noise and describe it to themselves and recall the last time they interacted with it.

Emotional Thermometer

• Name the emotion you’re bringing to a session: Have each participant write down or call out the emotion they’re feeling. This helps each participant know how they and other participants are feeling, what different emotions look like, and how to better interact with their group members based on how they’re feeling.

Group Sharing

• Circle sharing: To encourage active listening, create small groups. Have your participants position their chairs in a circle so everyone can make eye contact. To strengthen empathy, you can facilitate deeper discussion around what a participant shares by asking, “What perspective is that person coming from?”*When discussing emotionally charged topics, it’s important to have guidelines to foster a BRAVE space —stay engaged, experience discomfort, speak your truth, and expect and accept nonclosure.

Creativity

• Poetry: Write a poem from someone else’s perspective. Have your participants choose someone they don’t know. This helps them to understand that they don’t need to be best friends with someone to empathize with them.

• Partner Drawing: Divide participants into pairs. Give one member of the pair a picture that must not be shown to their partner. The person with the picture must give instructions to their partner so that they can draw it, but must not say what it is, eg, ‘draw a circle, draw two more circles inside the circle about halfway up’. The person picture cannot watch the person draw it? Compare the drawing with the original. Hand out more pictures and ask participants to swap roles. The person with the picture can give instructions in a similar manner as in part 1 but this time the person drawing can ask yes/no questions and the person with the picture can watch as they draw. Half the group can begin by telling the person what the object is.

Play interest and identity-related Bingo. Instead of squares filled with numbers or vocabulary words, create cards with information relating to your students. Such as ‘I was born in a different country,’” or “Talk about 3 things you're grateful for.”