 Now moving on to our third strategy and we'll be talking about emotions and attention. So the third way in which emotions impact learning. So I was saying earlier that emotions drive our attention. So they influence our ability to process information and understand what we encounter. How are these reactions that I have in my body, in my thought process impacting how I react into the world who I am as a person, right? But the thing is that not all emotions are the same. Many times when we are experiencing big feelings and that is very true for our students as you are probably know, when they're experiencing those big feelings, they are not able to focus, right? Our brain doesn't work well under stress. And actually stress and that it has been one of the greatest consequences of the global pandemic. Students are coming back to the classroom with additional trauma and high levels of stress because they have experience, social isolation and different adverse experiences that are impacting their ability to be focused in the classroom. And we are seeing students experiencing greater levels of stress and experiencing those big emotions. And what happens when students are in those states, if you can go back to that prior slide, is that it's robbing them from that neural functioning that they need in order to learn, right? All the resources that they have in their working memory are being robbed of those resources because they are experiencing these big emotions. So the impact for the classroom in this case is that we need to consider the emotions that the students experience, not only in the classroom, how we are creating the environment in the classroom to make sure that students have an opportunity to refocus, to feel safe, to feel supported, but also the experiences that they bring from home. And as educators, we don't have control over what happens with students at home, right? But we do have control of creating a space when the students arrive from home to our classroom that they have that opportunity to refocus, to center themselves so we can prepare the brain for learning. So when we don't teach social emotional learning, when we don't help students to understand their emotions, to name them, to be able to identify where they feel them in their body so they can really notice, well, what's the difference between being annoyed and being upset, right? Those are important things that we need to teach our kids. When they don't understand those nuances, they cannot navigate their internal world, right? So we need to create that awareness of what's going on inside. And we do that through different strategies that we are talking here today, but one of them is to creating these emotional check-ins. This time and space when we are coming together with our students as an opportunity to regulate the nervous system. And regular emotional check-ins come in many different shapes and sizes. Truly, you can use many different activities as an opportunity to regulate emotions, but some of the most common ones is to hold a classroom meeting at the beginning of the day, an opportunity for the classroom community to come together and see, like I asked you when we started, what are the emotions that you are coming into the space? Because if most of you were furious and I had seen furious or upset or other big feelings there, maybe we needed to change the focus of the presentation and maybe let people process those emotions before we started to share some of the content, right? Because we know that those emotions impact our readiness for learning. Other opportunities when transitions tend to be hard for kids, right? If you are coming from recess, back into the classroom or kids are transitioning from different teachers, they need some time to reconnect, right? To gather themselves and to regulate the level of energy, right? Sometimes we are doing activities in the classroom that require our students to have higher levels of energy and that's okay, but sometimes, depending on the activity, we need to regulate that energy. So, for example, doing some selling, journaling or drawing about their feelings might be a good opportunity to help students transition between different activities. And then this idea of exit tickets, I know many of you use exit tickets in your classroom for academic learning. So, here's an opportunity to use exit tickets to inquire about students' emotional experience during the day. What is the emotion that they have when they leave your classroom? And one of the questions that I really like to ask educators when I do trainings is, what are the emotions that you want students to fill in your classroom? And then looking at the teaching strategies that you use and seeing are those aligned, right? And if we are teaching in order for students to fill in a certain way, you create that alignment, probably your classroom is gonna be a joyful, a peaceful and engaging place, right? But sometimes that we go like this, it's not aligned, right? So, we have to create those experiences. So, at the end of the day, like this process of emotional check-in, truly we are getting at the core of normalizing, talking about emotions. And I know this is really hard for educators because there is, as I said, some unlearning that we need to do as adults in order to be able to normalize this discussion with our students. But these are some ways in which you can do this, engaging discussions about the meaning of emotions and how characters use them to make decisions during your literacy time. Most books, right? Have stories of characters that have challenges or that they face difficult decisions. And that brings an opportunity to talk about those emotions with our students. Explore the feelings that come up for students when they are presented with different subjects or activities. We are all different, right? So there are certain activities in the class that trigger different feelings for students. So just having an open conversation about what happens can really be helpful. And I wanna do a call-out on math, for example. Math is one of those subjects that generates very strong feelings in people. You either hate it or love it. But there is a spectrum, right? So my hope is that if we normalize talking about the feelings that math generates, more and more students, especially girls, can develop a love for math, right? Because we are giving students the tools to process those feelings and acknowledge, wow, yes, I'm feeling really stuck when I see this multiple step math problem. Like I get paralyzed almost and I'm not able to engage myself to do anything else, right? So if we give students those strategies to process those feelings, then they are in a better place to tackle the academic work that is necessary. And then finally, using those seesaw ACL stories to help students reflect on their own life experiences, right? To think about that consequential thinking. What happens, what are the consequences of our actions and what happens when we see that we have different choices when it comes to our thoughts, our behavior, our emotions, right? And many times students don't see, I'm sure that you have in your head those repeated offenders, right? Those students that really maybe keep you up at night or that they are always or often making the same mistakes, right? So those are students that cannot see that there are different choices when it comes to their behavior. And these normalizing, talking about emotions and helping students to process those emotions can be really a very powerful tool to help other students be healthy adults, right? To be healthy adults. So if you implement this strategy, one of the things that you will see is that students start to develop that capacity to really understand their feelings, understand their emotions, make better decisions because they are creating that space between that stimulus and that response and they are able to express their feelings in more constructive ways, right? So we go to a place where we are trying to find the balance between that individual processing but also our social context and being able to express our emotions in constructive and in helpful ways depending on the context. And I know that CISA has some additional tools that you can use in order to do this work. Yes, we do. Thank you, Dr. Martinez. So here at CISA again, we understand how important it is to incorporate SEL into daily routines in the classroom. We loved looking in the chat and seeing the different ways that it's already happening and some of the ideas that are coming out from this session tonight. So yes, we have a third collection that helps students pay attention to things as they are right now with kindness and curiosity and really focusing on improving that emotion regulation that we know is so hard for some of our, a lot of our students. And so CISA has teamed up with Mind Yeti which is an award-winning mindfulness program to create calm, focused and kind classrooms through mindfulness. And in each of these lessons, students are gonna follow a guided mindfulness lesson then complete interactive activities that are really gonna deepen their understanding of themselves and their emotions. So we're gonna take a closer look at a Mind Yeti lesson and we're gonna explore hello feelings. And so all Mind Yeti lessons start and they either have a watch or a listen and then a try activity and then a connect activity as well. And in the watch or listen part, students watch a video or listen to a mindfulness lesson. We're gonna listen to a clip of this one. Welcome to Mind Yeti. Our minds have different kinds of hubbubbles, thoughts, feelings and sensations. Our feeling hubbubbles are all the different emotions or feelings like sadness, happiness or anger that we feel every day. Today, we'll take some time to notice our feeling hubbubbles. Before we begin, take a moment to sit comfortably with your back straight and your feet or legs resting on the floor. Great. So after listening or watching, students then do a quick emotional check-in and we prompt them here to use the drawing tool, the pen to share how they're feeling after listening to the episode. So right now I feel calm. So I'm gonna use that drawing tool to circle calm. Next, students move on to the try section of the lesson. Students are given some examples and then they're given a task to try. Now in this lesson, they share what they look like when they feel a certain way. And so I'm feeling super excited to be here with all of you and Dr. Martinez. And so I'm gonna use that drawing tool again to write excited. And then I'm going to use the camera tool and I'm going to take a picture of my excited face. There we go. Resize or remove it if I need to. Of course, students can use any of the multimodal learning tools in CSAW to complete this lesson, the video drawing tool, typing, whatever they would like. And then all of our mind yeti lessons end with a connect activity. That can be done as Tracy mentioned previously either with a partner in the classroom or at home with families to really connect that learning that's happening in the classroom to their learning at home. Which you probably saw as a common theme in a lot of our CSAW lessons that we do emphasize that learning loop at CSAW where we connect the educators, the families and the students all together in the learning because we know that when they all come together it's much more powerful for the students and deepens their learning. Great, so to support you and your students in learning to regulate and understand the motions we have three of these mind yeti activities for you. And as you can see, again, these can be used with all kindergarten through second grade, not one per grade level. And again, we will share these links at the end of the session in the participant handout as well as in the follow-up email. So now let's reflect on the three ways emotions influence learning and the three strategies that you can use in your classroom with Dr. Martinez.