Social and emotional learning (SEL) is at the core of learning and development. Research suggests teaching social emotional learning activities to develop life skills significantly improves behavior, attitudes, employment, classroom management, and academic achievement. Consistent SEL practice results in productive habits that positively shape academic performance and student’s mental health. From early childhood to middle school to high school, it’s important to make time in the school day to teach students SEL skills such as positive self-talk, active listening, practicing mindfulness, and more.

Foster a love of learning in every student with Nearpod. Teachers can sign up for free below to access activities or social emotional development and create interactive lessons!

Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Curriculum Program

The benefits of SEL development can be applied to any grade and subject, but not every teacher is an SEL expert or has time to become one. Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program includes over 400 SEL lessons, activities, and videos built on CASEL’s five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Each resource helps develop knowledge and skills related to one of the CASEL competencies, pushing students to learn, apply, and reflect during the learning experience. This supplemental SEL program includes lifelong learning strategies for goal setting, time management, and growth mindset lessons for persisting, thinking flexibly, and more.

Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program provides an easy way to integrate SEL practices like positive interactions, gratitude, and reflective moments into daily learning to help create safe, inclusive, and effective classroom environments.

Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to explore Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program and unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

7 Social Emotional Learning (SEL) activities to use in your classroom

1. Facilitate positive classroom interactions

Collaborate Board activities bring limitless possibilities to instruction. The interactive discussion board facilitates positive interactions among classmates by increasing student engagement, crowdsourcing ideas, and delivering formative feedback. Bringing an interactive discussion board to your Nearpod lessons fosters the development of social emotional learning skills and builds on core competencies such as self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills. These are easy SEL activities you can integrate into your daily instruction.

Students truly feel part of the conversation with Collaborate Board, which helps teachers foster classroom culture. A classroom culture of respect, happiness, security, and challenge is foundational to engaging and effective learning. Students need to feel open to honest communication about their progress for improved teaching and learning. As students participate in various SEL activities, such as Collaborate Boards that are focused on fostering open communication, teachers intentionally build effective classroom culture. Students can feel comfortable sharing thoughts and challenges and see hurdles as opportunities to learn.

Check out some of our ready-made Collaborate Board activities developed specifically for building classroom culture:

• Scattergories: Letter S
• If You Could Fly
• Find Something: All About You

You can check in on how students are feeling by creating a Nearpod activity. Check-ins drive opportunities to build routines and create a comfortable learning environment. This can help teachers guide a rich dialogue among classmates. Students build an increased capacity to interact with others in a way that shows compassion and understanding.

2. Encourage self-reflection through drawing

Using drawing activities for self-portraits, scribble art, or providing a journaling opportunity for students to express their feelings supports self-reflection for students. Have students practice responsible decision-making, specifically analyzing situations, by completing a Draw It activity on Nearpod to share a challenge they are facing. Reflective Draw It activities help students understand their strengths and areas for growth.

Creating art is a practice of communication and empathy, a growth mindset, and self-reflection. The SEL Through Art series, part of Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program, explores the connection between art and SEL skills. This powerful medium elicits social and emotional learning experiences by helping students explore more about themselves and their life experiences.

3. Create moments of gratitude

Use Nearpod’s Drag & Drop interactive feature in your lessons to engage and connect students with social emotional learning in the classroom. Match feeling words, descriptions, and corresponding facial expressions to talk about resolving conflict and identifying different emotions. Students can discuss the importance of recognizing the good in their lives and expressing gratitude regularly. For instance, Nearpod’s interactive features, such as Collaborate Board, Open-Ended Question, and Poll, are the perfect way to start or end your day with an expression and acknowledgment of gratitude. Use Drag & Drop to create easy SEL activities for your lesson plans, like this one!

4. Collect meaningful student feedback

Creating opportunities for student voice in the classroom is key to building a positive school culture and gathering meaningful student feedback. To increase student talk, provide ample opportunities for engaging interaction through activities like Think-Pair-Share questions and Open-Ended Questions. When using Nearpod’s Open-Ended Question feature, make sure audio recording is enabled to give students multiple ways to engage in student voice. Nearpod’s formative assessment features, like Polls, empower educators to provide multiple ways for students to share valuable information personally. Include a Poll at the beginning or end of your lesson to gather student feedback, collect a formative assessment of emotions, or provide a reflective moment.

Additionally, utilize the Collaborate Board feature for a quick check-in at the beginning of class, asking simple questions to engage student thinking, build background knowledge, or gauge the overall mood of the classroom. Use what you’ve learned from gathering student feedback to help inform future classroom procedures or learning changes.

5. Brain Breaks!

Exclusive to Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program, Brain Breaks videos regulate the energy and focus of your classroom. Research suggests providing a quick break helps refresh the mind and makes it easier for students to focus on important tasks. Our videos help students break the patterns of fatigue, frustration, and lack of focus, and we made it easy for teachers to launch a video at any time throughout the day.

Choose between Calming or Energizing videos depending on the needs of your classroom at any moment. Use calming Brain Breaks as social and emotional learning activities to help students relax, settle their minds, and become refocused on the task.

Use energizing Brain Breaks to provide needed movement and increase the blood flow to the brain. An energizing activity helps reduce stress and anxiety and improves students’ ability to focus.

6. Choose from Nearpod’s premade activities

Choose from over 100 premade SEL activities using Nearpod’s interactive features like Draw It, Time to Climb, and Drag & Drop to incorporate into lessons, or as a bell ringer, an exit ticket, for extra practice, or homework. Nearpod’s social-emotional learning activities are built on the five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. Students use information from their own experiences and values to guide their thinking and learn from others. These are easy SEL activities you can integrate into your daily instruction.

7. Collecting real-time insights

Real-time insight into students’ learning is vital for developing SEL. This immediate feedback allows educators to address emotional and social challenges as they arise, helping students to better manage their emotions. By closely monitoring progress and providing timely support, teachers can foster a nurturing environment where students feel understood and supported.

With Nearpod, real-time insights into student thinking allow teachers to adapt their instruction. Add an Open-Ended Question, Draw It, or Collaborate Board to a lesson on the fly with Quick Launch when you see an opportunity to engage in SEL-integrated instruction intentionally.

These engagement tools ensure students have low-stakes ways to share their thinking. As a result, this simple way to gather real-time insight gives students a voice in the moment while providing you with important feedback.

Teach SEL with Nearpod

Nearpod’s social emotional learning curriculum provides instruction, reflection, and practice opportunities around CASEL-aligned social and emotional learning competencies: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness.

By implementing SEL programs, educators can show students how to manage their emotions effectively through social and emotional skills. For young children, developing these skills enhances their abilities to understand and interact with others. It’s essential that schools prioritize SEL to ensure children learn the necessary competencies for overall well-being and success.

When SEL curriculum practices are thoughtfully selected and used authentically, they have greater power to be effective. View your role as an educator through the lens of the five core competencies of SEL to enhance your teaching and enrich your classroom environment. Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program easily incorporates SEL in the classroom, helping educators meet students’ social and emotional learning needs.

New to Nearpod? Make sure you’re signed up to access these lessons and activities!

Teachers can sign up for free below to access and create interactive lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to explore Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program and unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

Click here to learn more about Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Curriculum Program

References

CASEL.org. Social Emotional Learning competencies. (2022).

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D. & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1): 405–432.

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen, et al. “Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 7, no. 4, July 2012, pp. 352–64. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612447308.

Jessica Clarke

Jessica Clarke is the Curriculum Manager at Nearpod.

The post 7 Social Emotional Learning (SEL) activities to use in the classroom appeared first on Nearpod Blog.

Nearpod’s interactive activities in the classroom have the power to add interest and excitement to everyday learning. Using digital activities such as gamification, drag and drop, drawing, matching, and collaborative discussion enhances classroom learning for all students.

New to Nearpod? Teachers can sign up for a free Nearpod account below to access these resources, interactive activities, and engaging lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

What interactive activities keep learners engaged during a lesson?

Interactive activities keep students engaged by providing a creative and collaborative learning experience. With our growing options of Drag & Drop, Draw It, Time to Climb, Matching Pairs, Collaborate Board, Quiz, Poll, and Open-Ended Questions, teachers have multiple options to meet the specific needs of the diverse learners in their classrooms.

Activity Banks offer an ever-growing collection of ready-to-use engaging activities. With 2,000+ activities available, and hundreds more being added, there’s something to meet the needs of every classroom.

Our standards-aligned activities provide comprehensive opportunities for:

• Recalling prior knowledge 
• Supporting a student’s learning progression 
• Building an understanding of essential skills 
• Collecting essential assessment data 

6 quick ways to use interactive classroom activities

1. Use gamified interactive activities

Gamification keeps students engaged and alert! Not only does friendly competition and fun gameplay lead to increased participation, but it also motivates students to dig deeper into what their learning. When used consistently, educational classroom games can increase students’ social and emotional learning skills, such as problem-solving, collaborating with peers, behavior management, and more. Teachers can also get real-time insight into how students are doing while keeping them focused and smiling.

A student-favorite interactive classroom game on Nearpod is called Time to Climb. With this activity, you can assess understanding with a gamified multiple-choice quiz where students can race to the top of a mountain with their favorite characters.

2. Demonstrate steps, labels, and sorting with interactive diagrams

Captivate learners through problem-solving and critical-thinking activities. With interactive diagrams and models, students can show their understanding of the concepts being taught. Use these classroom activities to have them create timelines, outline steps, pair labels, and sort ideas into buckets to demonstrate what they learned.

Drag & Drop activities teach concepts in a fun and engaging way. Students can sequence events in a timeline and steps in a process, label diagrams, and models, or sort properties, categories, and characteristics. You can also create your own activity by uploading a background and inputting draggable text or images. Drag & Drop activities provide students with gamified learning opportunities and increased engagement and retention. As students physically engage with concepts, learning will be transformed within an interactive classroom environment.

Here are some Drag & Drop activities you can use in your classroom:

• Sort natural and manmade resources (Grades K-2)
• Showcase steps of the life cycle of a bean (Grades 3-5)
• Add, Subtract, Multiply, & Divide Decimals (Grades 6-8)
• Identify euphemism figurative language examples (Grades 9-12)

3. Provide opportunities for creative expression

Let students express themselves creatively through drawing. This could be on a blank sheet of paper, the board, canvas, or their devices. Having students draw on their devices can address common misconceptions as they work in real time, creating a truly adaptive, interactive classroom.

Our Draw It activities provide interactive tools for students to represent problem situations and a working space in which teachers can see in real-time the progression of student thinking as they write, draw, and record their thinking processes. Draw It activities are the perfect fit for when teachers want to see work in progress. It’s one of our most used activities on Nearpod because it is easy for teachers to customize and collect student responses. You can create your own Draw It activity by creating a prompt for students, using a blank background or uploading your own, adding a reference media if you please, and then having them complete the activity on their own devices.

Here are some Draw It activities you can use in your classroom:

• Animals Preparing for Winter: (Grades K-2)
• Drawing Shapes: (Grades K-2)
• Template: Life Skills Cause & Effect (Grade K-2)

4. Prioritize classroom discussions

Encourage classroom discussions to create a rich dialogue, facilitate discussion for all student learners, and give students multiple opportunities to see how their peers solve problems and hear the language they use to describe representations. Not only will this keep your students focused, but it will also help them practice social and emotional learning skills.

How can you ensure all students are participating and can be heard? Through our Collaborate Board, students can share ideas with a larger audience as they begin their discovery on selected topics. With this activity, students can share their thoughts and ideas on an interactive digital board that’s moderated by the teacher. Teachers can support a whole class discussion while ensuring all students’ ideas are heard and considered.

Here are some Collaborate Board activities you can use in your classroom:

• Check-In (Grades 2-12)
• Which Doesn’t Belong: Reptiles & Amphibians: (Grades 1-5)
• Would You Rather: Run or Fly (Grades 3-5)
• All About Fictional Characters (Grades 6-12)

5. Matching activities for students to self-asses

It’s important for students to assess themselves to see how they’re understanding the lesson. Our Matching Pairs activities guide students in thinking through processes, demonstrate student understanding, and provide accessibility for visual learners. With this activity, students can match two cards that pair together. They are given instant feedback to allow for opportunities to self-assess and guide students in refining and revising their thinking. In the end, you’ll be able to see how many tries it took for them to get all pairs correct. Teachers can create their own Matching Pairs with just a few clicks on Nearpod and add a time limit with the timer!

Here are some Matching Pairs classroom activities:

• Match Seasons and Weather (Kindergarten)
• Internet Vocabulary Grades (K-5)
• Narrative Writing: Text Examples (Grade 6)
• Trigonometric Ratios: Matching (Grades 9-10)

6. Keep students focused by launching activities on-the-fly

Through our Quick Launch feature, teachers can add learning activities to drive adaptive teaching and differentiated, personalized instructional decision-making that accelerates learning for all. Teachers can use Quick Launch to launch an Open-Ended Question, Collaborate Board, or Timer!

Use Quick Launch for learning fun moments to create a quick exit ticket, bell ringer, or do-now. You can also consider using this for those in-the-moment sparks of inspiration or when you’re trying to get student’s attention back to a lesson.

Sign up for free to use these interactive classroom activities

Increase transformative learning in your classroom through these tips. As features and tools become more engaging, teachers have the ability to design learning experiences that are more effective, interactive, and personalized. Use Nearpod’s collection of features to create an interactive classroom where student learning comes first truly!

New to Nearpod? Teachers can sign up for a free Nearpod account below to access these resources, interactive activities, and engaging lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

Jessica Clarke

Jessica Clarke is the Curriculum Manager at Nearpod.

The post 6 quick ways to use interactive classroom activities appeared first on Nearpod Blog.

How to make your own interactive Drag and Drop activity

Nearpod’s Drag and Drop activity allows students to sort, order, or label images or text sequentially or in groups. Educators can choose from an ever-growing collection of premade activities or create customized activities to meet specific classroom needs. To create your own, you can add a content background image and customize draggable items for the activity. When paired with all of Nearpod’s interactive slides-based lessons, interactive videos, and other gamification and activities, this feature gives teachers many tools to meet the needs of diverse learners.

*Drag and Drop is only available with a Gold, Platinum, or School/District account.

New to Nearpod? Teachers can sign up for free below to access these resources, interactive activities, and engaging lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

Already have access to a free Nearpod account? Click here to upgrade to Gold!

5 Ways to use Drag and Drop activity maker in the classroom

1. Label diagrams, images, and maps

With seemingly unlimited possibilities, these activities provide a visual and interactive learning opportunity, increase student engagement, and encourage retention. Start off by labeling diagrams, images, maps, patterns, and cycles. Here are some examples you can use in your classroom:

• Geography: Label the continents, oceans, and state flags
• Science: Label the parts of a plant, the parts of the brain, or the parts of an animal cell
• English Language Arts (ELA): Label the parts of speech in a sentence.

Here are some premade activities you can use:

• Locating & Identifying States: Northwestern States (Grades 3-5): In this activity, students identify the location of and label five northwestern states.
• Labeling the Parts of a Plant (Grade 4): Students can practice reading about and identifying the different parts of a plant.
• Labeling Parts of the Brain (Grades 9-12): Have students showcase their understanding of the brain by dragging labels to their correct positions.

2. Sequence events and information

Use a Drag and Drop activity maker to sequence events, steps, procedures, and information. Here are some examples you can use in your classroom:

• Social studies: Sequence the events leading up to the American Revolution
• English Language Arts (ELA): Sequence the order of events in a story: the beginning, middle, and end.
• Math: Sequence a collection of fractions on a number line

Here are some premade activities you can use:

• Representing the Numbers 14, 15, 16 (Grades K-1): In this Math activity, students will engage in practicing various methods of representing numbers using draggable objects.
• A Key Events Timeline: The Formation of the Union (Grades 6-8): Students show their understanding of crucial events that paved the way for the union’s establishment.
• Story Elements (Grades 6-8): Students will read a passage and identify the story elements.

3. Sort concepts and categories

Here are some examples you can use in your classroom to sort concepts, characteristics, properties, and categories:

• Science: Sort animals into groups, the five senses, and elements of the Periodic Table.
• Social studies: Sort the causes and effects of WWII and the powers of the three branches of government.
• Social emotional learning: Sort the steps for goal setting, categorizing emotions, and examples of empathetic and non-empathetic statements.

Here are some premade activities you can use:

• Local, State & National Government (Grades 3-5): Students explore the roles and selection processes of government officials at the local, state, and national levels and identify their services.
• Identifying Congruent Triangles (Grades 9-12): Students can sort triangles based on their characteristics
• Recognizing Emotions (Grades 6-8)*: Students identify how different situations can induce different emotions by ranking how they may feel in different scenarios.

*This lesson is only available on Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program.

4. Gather student responses to assess knowledge and gauge understanding

Providing students with timely feedback and support based on formative assessments is a highly effective way to enhance and improve a student’s learning. When teachers can create opportunities for feedback on a consistent basis, learning can reach a whole new level. Consider gathering feedback beyond the traditional assessment methods.

Create Drag and Drop game as an end-of-lesson or mid-lesson metacognitive check-in, gauge how students feel about learning a specific topic, or check in about the difficulty level of a homework assignment. These activities can aid students in indicating stress or focus levels or whether they find a lesson interesting or challenging.

5. Set expectations for learning and establish routines and procedures

Imagine having a tool that actively engages your students in understanding and establishing routines and procedures to allow your students to participate in building the classroom community. This will help create opportunities for students to become active participants in the classroom. Use interactive activities to sequence classroom procedures, gauge student understanding of classroom rules and policies, and take a snapshot of the level of excitement for a particular topic in the daily class agenda.

Use Nearpod’s interactive activities

As students physically engage with concepts through Drag and Drop elearning games, learning will be transformed into an immersive experience. These activities will prove to be a powerful EdTech tool in the classroom, enhancing learning and building stronger connections between teachers and learners and among classmates. Be sure to make these activities an integral part of instruction this school year and take advantage of our ready-to-launch standards-aligned activities, growing into the hundreds throughout this fall.

New to Nearpod? Teachers can sign up for free below to access these resources, interactive activities, and engaging lessons. Administrators can schedule a call with an expert to unlock the full power of Nearpod for schools and districts.

Jessica Clarke

Jessica Clarke is the Curriculum Manager at Nearpod.

The post 5 Ways to use Drag and Drop activity maker in the classroom appeared first on Nearpod Blog.

Research shows enhancing social and emotional learning using SEL resources that address CASEL’s five core competencies significantly improves not only social and emotional skills, but behavior, attitudes, employment, classroom management, and academic achievement. Durlak et al. (2011) notes an 11-percentile-point gain in student academic achievement for SEL participants. In addition, scientific studies show the benefits of SEL filtering into multiple fields will impact participants for years to come.

The benefits speak for themselves, and yet for many educators, it’s difficult to find the time and proper resources to focus on developing and strengthening SEL. So, the question is: How might educators include SEL skills in their day-to-day learning to take advantage of the proven benefits? Here are 3 social and emotional learning tips for any classroom.

3 social and emotional learning tips for any classroom

1. Embed SEL into your daily lesson plans and learning experiences

SEL doesn’t need to be a separate curriculum; after all, SEL principles are at the core of learning and development. Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness Program provides an easy way to integrate SEL practices like positive interactions, gratitude, and reflective moments into daily learning to help create safe, inclusive, and effective classroom environments. The key is intentionality. When SEL practices are thoughtfully selected and used authentically, they have greater power to be effective.

• Use Nearpod’s Collaborate Board interactive feature in your lessons to facilitate positive interactions among classmates
• Add a Think-Pair-Share activity or Class Discussion slide to a lesson to encourage relationship building and promote social skills
• Include a Poll at the beginning or end of your lesson to gather student feedback, collect a formative assessment of emotions, or provide a reflective moment
• Add a Draw It activity to provide a journaling opportunity for students to express their feelings

2. Build and strengthen your own social and emotional learning skills

As an educator, developing your own SEL skills can have a positive impact on your personal and professional life. The more you practice SEL, the more you become capable of modeling, encouraging, and teaching these essential skills to your students. Try viewing your role as an educator through the lens of the five core competencies of SEL to enhance your teaching and enrich your classroom environment.

3. Consistently integrate SEL into classroom routines

Consistent SEL practice, even small steps, will result in productive habits that shape student learning and life experiences. When educators are intentional about the frequency and purpose of SEL practice, classroom routines and learning environments are strengthened and enhanced.

• Use Nearpod as a check-in to build routines and create a comfortable learning environment.
• Add an Open-Ended Question, Draw It, or Collaborate Board to a lesson on the fly with Quick Launch as you see an opportunity to intentionally engage in SEL-integrated instruction.

By infusing SEL into your daily lesson plans and learning experiences, building and strengthening your own SEL skills, and being consistent in integrating SEL, you provide your students with the opportunity for improved behavior, attitudes, employment, classroom management, academic achievement, and social and emotional skills. When educators prioritize intentionally, consistent SEL they work to create an effective classroom environment with better-managed classes and healthier and happier students. Teaching social and emotional learning is a win-win for teachers and students!

Nearpod’s 21st Century Readiness K-12 Program offers resources to embed 21st-century skills like SEL, digital citizenship, and college and career readiness into every classroom. The Social and Emotional Learning collection includes lessons and activities that teach students core competencies, critical thinking, lifelong learning strategies, and growth mindset practices.

References

CASEL.org. Social Emotional Learning competencies. (2021).

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D. & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1): 405–432.

Jessica Clarke

Jessica Clarke is the Curriculum Manager at Nearpod.

The post 3 social and emotional learning tips for any classroom appeared first on Nearpod Blog.