We have learned a lot about the importance of internet security in the last year of distance and hybrid learning. For example, we know that the digital world brings both challenges and opportunities for our students’ social interaction. It can be a really negative space, but it can also be a place of kindness and empathy. However, it is not enough to simply tell the children on the Internet to “be nice”. You need to be taught. This is why we love these free SEL lessons to teach kids in grades 2 through 6 how to be friendly online.
Lesson 1.1: Perceiving Feelings
We start by addressing “the thing called empathy.” In this short introductory lesson for 2nd and 3rd grade students, you will read out a list of common emotional words and give them time to think about when they felt this way and what was behind them. You will then begin an activity to help students figure out how people feel in books and other media.
Lesson 1.2: Practicing Empathy
This lesson distorts a bit older. Grades 4-6 students try to practice empathy with people they meet online, which is difficult because it is so difficult to read emotions digitally. You will learn to use cues like emojis, photos, and capital letters to better understand how people feel when texting and posting.
Lesson 2.1: Your goodness grief
This is such a fun Grade 2-3 lesson, and many kids are familiar with Val-O-Grams, casual kindness, and the like. You will invite your students to think of someone in their life – perhaps a friend, teacher, or family member – whom they want to show kindness and fill out a kindness schedule to make planning easier.
Lesson 2.2: Ways to Show Kindness
In this lesson, for Grades 4 through 6, students will brainstorm how to show kindness in different scenarios, such as:
- People who leave disrespectful comments on a selfie posted by a friend.
- Playing an online game and one player talking to another player about trash.
- Several friends are making mean jokes about another student in a private group chat.
Lesson 2.3: From Negative to Nice
Help your students flip the script in this lesson for the entire year. Students take negative comments like “Everyone wears purple tomorrow, but don’t tell Lilly” and think about how they could react to make the conversation more positive.
Lesson 2.4: About your tone
It’s so easy to have a misunderstanding when texting or chatting online. Students in grades 4-6 watch a series of text messages (“Whatever,” “kk good,” “That’s so cool”) and read them in different keys (angry, sarcastic, friendly). Then they discuss how they can better communicate what they mean.
Lesson 2.5: How words can change the whole picture
This all ages lesson is a great opportunity to build media literacy while learning about kindness and empathy. Students will look at a series of pictures with different text to understand the power of their words, especially when combined with pictures they post.
Lesson 2.6: Kind Kingdom
One of our favorite things about this curriculum is that it is designed to complement Google’s internet security game. Enroll your students in Interland and bring them to Kind Kingdom to practice the online kindness skills they have been working on!
Would you like these SEL lessons plus other internet safety lessons?
Get the Be Internet Awesome Curriculum
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