6 Bite-Size Activities to Fill Time Between Lessons

Got five minutes before your next lesson starts? Use it to teach social-emotional skills!

There are many ways to incorporate social-emotional skills into your daily practice — even during those few minutes between lessons. Try out these bite-size activities to make good use of free time and promote students’ social and emotional development.

1. If You Really Knew Me…
   Strengthen students’ peer relations and get them practicing communication skills in this game that promotes speaking and listening.
2. All Tangled Up
   The goal of this game is to untangle a “knot” of students through cooperation, communication, listening, and working together.
3. Feelings Playing Cards
   These playing cards show a variety of emotions, and students can play a number of games to learn and reinforce SEL concepts.
4. Conversation Cards and Comics
   Help students build confidence and communication skills with these conversation cards. Each card has an initial question and follow-up questions on a variety of fun topics.
5. Animal Emotion Role-Play
   What does a sad cow sound like?! Students will have lots of fun practicing emotions with this dice game that has them act out animals experiencing a range of feelings.
6. Emotional Charades
   A spin on the classic game, emotional charades has students act out a scenario that causes strong emotions (i.e. eating broccoli). After students guess the scenario, have them talk about the correlated emotions and appropriate ways to deal with their feelings.

SEL can be taught anytime, anywhere — even in the five minutes between lessons. Make good use of this downtime by having students explore and strengthen their social and emotional development. You’ll keep students engaged and learning, and they will have fun while doing so.

Contact our advisors to learn more!