Social-Emotional Learning may just seem like the latest educational buzz phrase, but it's an essential component of any curriculum. Teachers tasked with incorporating more SEL into their day often feel frustrated by the lack of time and support. Read on for some ideas on how to easily build your students' skills without finding an extra hour in your school day.

Social-Emotional Learning refers to skills that allow students to be their best selves through building positive relationships, managing their emotions, and learning how to make informed decisions. These skills not only make children better students, but extend beyond the classroom to help them become more active members of society.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has identified five main components of SEL.

• Self-Awareness
• Self-Management
• Responsible Decision-Making
• Relationship Skills
• Social Awareness

As you know, stories are a great place to start when teaching these kinds of skills. Books build empathy, teach students how to navigate friendships, and help students to deal with difficult emotions like anger and grief. Incorporating SEL into your daily reading program with intentionality allows students to build multiple skills at once! They are learning to decode and make decisions. They are practicing comprehension and kindness.

Over the next several months, we'll be exploring each of these topics in depth with the help of one of our authors and experts. We'll show you ways to foster conversations and model these skills through stories for every age group, as well as provide activity ideas that complement what you're already doing in your classroom every day. And, of course, we'll provide lists of quality literature to help you update your SEL toolbox.

Be sure to bookmark this page as we update it each month with more resources to help you make the second half of your school year even more valuable to you and your students.