Emotions and Feelings

A Telecollaboration Lesson for
6th Grade Social Skills

Introduction:

This lesson was developed as part of the requirements for EDTEC 570, Advance Teaching with Technology. The following activities will enhance student’s oral and social skills using EPAL, Telecollaboration, by communicating their feelings and emotions with other students around the world.

This lesson will demonstrate how to express feelings with other students as well developing listening skills. Students will be able to identify the problem, analyze the choices and formulate positive and negative consequences. The students will work together to make group decisions. The goal of the following activities is to encourage students to think of different ways in which they may solve their problems and edify their personal skills with situations that surrounds them in their daily lives.

Learners

This lesson is anchored to 6th grade language, and involves social skills and technology to a lesser extent.

Students should have a concept idea of the significance of friendship, feelings, communication and emotions. The use of the Internet is essential for communicationing their emotions through EPAL.

Curriculum Standards

Students will write to an EPAL friend about their feeling towards an issue that surrounds their community. Communicating their emotions is the key element in this lesson.

Language Art Standards
3.0 Literary Response and Analysis
3.2 Analyze the effect of the qualities of the character (feelings) on the plot and the resolution of the conflict.

1.0 Writing Strategies
1.1 Choose the form of writing (personal letter) that best suits the intended purpose.
1.4 Use organizational features of electronic text ( email addresses) to locate information.

1.0 Listening and Speaking Strategies
1.4 Select a focus, an organizational structure, and a point of view, matching the purpose, message, occasion, and local modulation to the audience.

Technology Foundation Standards
2. Social, ethical, and human issues
* students practice responsible use of technolgoy system, information and software.
3. Technology productivity tools
* students use technology tools to enhance learning, increase productivity and promote creativity.
4.Technology communication tools
*students use telecommunicating to collaborate, publish, and interact of peers, experts and other audiences.

This lesson will help students in their critical thinking skills because they will have to think on the issues that surround their community and express them in writing. Students will have to work with budding around the world and describe the problems that are occurring in their environment.

Partners

EPAL is a collaboration Internet programthat can be utilize around the world to communicate their concerns or issues on a specific topic. This program will enhance students’ knowledge from around the world and will give them the opportunity to chat and discuss their concerns.

Process

Day 1
Being Friends

Read The Acorn People by Ron Jones
Discuss the theme of friendship developed in the story. Guided questions to ask students; What is a good friend? How can they be good friends? To have a good friend you must be a good friend. Here are some of the ways good friends treat each other.
·    Good friends listen to each other
·    Good friends don’t put each other down or hurt each other’s feelings.
·    Good friends try to understand each other’s feeling and moods.
·    Good friends help each other solve problems.
·    Good friends respect each other.

Role play reporter and interviewer. Pair students and they decide who will be the reporter and who will be the interviewer. The reporter will ask :
1.    Suppose you were invited to birthday party, but your best friend was deliberately left out. What would you do? Why?

2.   Have you ever felt left out? What happened? Did you do anything about it?

Group activity
Discussion on what is a friend with the class. Have the children look for example of friendship behavior in magazines or make pictures of them. Then have them use the pictures to create a classroom collage. They could also contribute slogans or mottos about friendship.

Day 2
Friends

Divide the class into a group of four of five. Each group’s task is to choose one group member to play the role of a new student in class. The new students' challenge is to try to gain acceptance into the group. After the role-play, discuss with the class how it felt to be the new student and how it felt to be part of the “in-group”. Discuss some of the different ways of “breaking in” to a new group.

Writing Assignment
Make two lists 1. Things people do when they leave other out, and 2. Things people do when they invite other in or make them feel part to the group. Discuss the list in class.

·   Encourage students to talk with each other about their feelings in regards to friendship.
·   Encourage students to show appreciation when a friend does something thoughtful or helpful.

Day 3
Respect for Others

Students will understand the significance of respecting themselves and others as a way to achieve solid friendship. They also learn about how to show each other with respect from they listen to how they respect confidences.

Writing Assingment
Students write letters expressing their sorrow over past hurts to others, appreciation for special deeds, and poetry. During this activity, students also collect pictures, poems, and some of their own writing to create a friendship book.

* Teacher can show Personality Poster to students to demonstrate the emotions that people feel.

Day 4
Listening to Others

How to be a good listener?
·   Look at the person who is talking.
·   Listen, and don’t interrupt
·   Ask question to find out more.
·   Nod, or say something to show you understand.
·   Repeat what you heard in your own words.

Before doing this lesson, teacher needs to teach the following rules to students.
Ask students: Has anybody ever gotten mad at you because you weren’t listening to them? What happened?

Class discussion.
Create a group story by having the students sit in a group. One person starts to tell a story. After a certain time limit, or when the student gets to a point in the story that it can change, the next person continues the story. This goes from one person to the next around the circle until the story is completed. Discuss how listening carefully to what each person added to the story helped the group tell the story.

Writing Assignment:
·   Have students keep a daily journal of how listening or not listening affects their day.
·   Students create a newspaper with each student being a reporter. Each reporter interviews another student. The interviews are written up a published in the newspaper. After it is distributed to the class, have a discussion to find out if the reporters accurately listened.

Day 5
Decision Making

Conflict resolution is a trend to which students need to become familiar. They should understand the possible impact that alternative dispute resolution may have in their lives.

A.    Students will be informed that they are going to make a decision by reading a situation given by the teacher that talks about making decisions. Students should break up into groups of five or six.

B.    Ask students to read the story to their group and identify the problem. Write the problem.
1.    Ask students to identify possible options for resolving the problem. List negative and positive options.
2.    Next, have the class identify the consequence (positive or negative) for the specific option. List the consequences with the corresponding option number.

C.    Ask students to share their story with the class.
Example of story:
Jose is not doing very well in his English class. Whether he passes or not depends on his final written project. Even though he has always tried hard, he hasn’t been able to get very good grades. He finds the paper that his brother did on the topic four years ago and this paper received an ‘A’.

Day 6
EPAL

Students will be able to communicate their emotions to a friend in the EPAL program. Students will choose a friend form around the world at their grade level to collaborate their ideas on a specific topic. “All About My New Friend”
·    Students will e-mail and collaborate ideas
·    Students will learn about their new friend from around the world
·    Students will share their feelings and emotions toward issues that surround their environment.

Pre-Lesson Preparation	What do you need to do before the lesson is implemented?
Day 1	How to be Friends? Define what friendship is? and give examples. Prior Knowledge. Read book on friendship. The Acorn People by Ron Jones
Day 2	Friends. Divide the class into groups of four of five.
Day 3	Respect for Others. Define respect. Students need to know how to write a friendly letter.
Day 4	Listening to Others. Demonstrate the 5 key elements of good listeners.
Day 5	Decision Making. Students need to understand how to verbally communicate without an aggression behavior. ie. getting angry and violent.
Day 6	EPAL. Students will need to know how to operate the computer and the Internet. Students will need an EPAL account.
Post Lesson Wrapup	Class discussion on EPAL discussion

Variations

Students may use this lesson using penpals insted of EPAL with another class or another school. Using journals or letter format may substitude EPAL.

Resources Needed

* EPAL account for all students
* Video materials
* daily journals
* magazines
* samples of art work for emotions

Evaluation

Wrtiting assignments for activity 2,3,4. Check daily on student’s discussion with their friend from EPAL. Visual behavior of expression as a friend with classroom members. Student’s daily journal on listening and emotions.

Credits & References

-heart picture http://www.barrysclipart.com/img/6/WB/zed_non_com/clipconxn/animations/love/0526.gif
-old man picture: htp://www.pixar.com
-

"We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is hereby granted for other educators to copy this lesson, update or otherwise modify it, and post it elsewhere provided that the original author's name is retained along with a link back to the original URL of this lesson. On the line after the original author's name, you may add Modified by Juanita Nunez and Maria Cabrera-Chavez on March 5, 2003. If you do modify it, please let me know and provide the new URL."

Last updated on March 5, 2003. Based on a template from EDTEC 570 at SDSU