Running a classroom comes with a lot of difficulties, especially with younger children. There are many lessons to teach your classroom that will help your students develop into fine adults. One of the most important lessons a teacher can teach is emotional intelligence. If you didn’t know, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others. Its important children are capable of this from a young age, and it’s more than likely they have been taught it to some degree from their home. But if this is a child’s first time being constantly surrounded by similar age students, then it’s important to reinforce it while they’re amongst their peers. Here are a few ways you can help your students with emotional intelligence.
Help Students Understand Emotions
While your students likely have a good understanding of emotions, it’s possible that they’ll be experiencing many new ones whether by experiencing the emotions themselves or observing them via one of their classmates. It’s imperative that they understand how to recognize and react properly to these various emotions. If they say something mean to one of their classmates which causes the classmate to cry, they need to understand why what they did upset the classmate and why it was wrong. In turn, if they’re upset or frustrated about something, they should understand how to recognize it and how to handle their emotions.
Encourage Creativity
A great way to get kids to understand their emotions better is by letting them express their emotions through creative outlets. Many professionals believe that creativity is absolutely necessary when going through difficult emotional times, and that giving your students the opportunity to express that creativity, they’re also being given new ways to handle their emotions.
Let Students Fail
It’s important that students understand they can’t get everything right. While we obviously don’t want our students to literally fail their classes, it’s important that everyone makes mistakes at some point in their lives. Making mistakes is normal, and having a good grasp of that is vital to forming emotional intelligence. Everyone is bound to fail at some point or another, but that doesn’t mean we give up.