Grade 4: Focus on Social and Emotional Learning Collection: Instructional Guide

This 30-week Instructional Guide for Grade 4 provides a standards-based program for teaching social and emotional learning through a literacy-based approach. We employ the activities of thinking, reading, speaking, and writing in each lesson, which allows students to master and apply the content through multiple access points.

CASEL's five competencies provide the framework for the Grade 1 books and lesson plans. Each competency is “kicked off” with an introductory lesson plan that showcases the concept and hooks the student into learning more about it.

Each of the competencies is then broken down into CASEL's suggested 4–6 subcategories of skills and knowledge for student learning. For each subcategory, there is one weekly lesson plan. For each lesson plan, one or two age-appropriate fiction and/or nonfiction books have been provided to serve as the literacy anchor for the SEL skill.

The lessons are 20–30 minutes long. Each lesson has a modular design that can be pulled apart and implemented flexibly according to the needs of the students and teacher.

Content of a Typical SEL Lesson Plan

Essential Questions:

Essential questions encourage deep thinking and are central to social and emotional learning. Students demonstrate their knowledge by answering these questions and related “I can” statement that serves as the learning target for the lesson.

Focus Activities:

The focus activity provides a quick, yet thorough dive into the main social and emotional learning concept.

Writing Prompts:

The writing prompts serve as a method by which students can apply the targeted SEL concept to their own contexts and lives.

Extension Activities:

Extension activities are a series of suggestions for deepening and broadening student interactions with the SEL concepts through multiple methods of engagement and differentiation.

Each lesson will have four extension suggestions:

To Reinforce: to give extra practice in the SEL concept

To Accelerate: to increase learning for those who have mastered the SEL concept

School/Home Connection: to share the SEL concept with the family of the student

Classroom Management Connection: to strengthen classroom management via incorporation of the SEL concept