Everywhere you go in the education world, people are buzzing about social-emotional learning. It’s not your average type of daily instruction, and that’s why it’s enjoying an increase in recent attention. This type of learning is characterized by a focus on emotion regulation, positive goal-setting, building relationships, and responsible decision-making.
Social-emotional learning benefits our students through the development of powerful interpersonal and self-awareness capacity. It prepares them well both for school and for life.
Today, you can find it everywhere in schools. Part of what has made its presence possible is the array of creative and diverse resources for supporting instruction. These include simple tools like lesson plans and social-emotional learning worksheets that are both readily available and simple to use.
We’d like to set you up with five of the best online sources we’ve found for these kinds of materials to help you with teaching social-emotional learning. If you’re looking for a wide variety of resources to help with your own SEL teaching, your search is over.
This is a huge knowledge base where educators of all sorts can find both free and paid resources for every subject and grade level they teach. TPT currently has over 3 million free items on their site, all crafted by educators for educators, and the list is growing daily. In addition, they offer an extensive list of social-emotional learning worksheets for grades K-12 that are diverse and highly creative.
Browse worksheets on Teachers Pay Teachers
Kristina Scully is the founder of Pathway2Success. She is a special educator of both elementary and middle school grades, with over 10 years of experience in the field of education. Her website offers an amazing array of creative tools for teachers, including over 100 different resources aimed at social-emotional learning. You can also check out here storefront on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Browse worksheets on Pathway2Success
Centervention provides online worksheets, games, and other activities to promote and improve awareness of social and emotional skills in K-8 students. Their free social-emotional learning worksheets are of high-quality and collaborative in nature. They’ll work very well in classrooms and small group settings. Skill areas that their resources cover include communication, cooperation, emotion regulation, empathy, impulse control, and social initiation.
Browse worksheets on Centervention
TeacherVision is a monthly subscription resource that offers innovative and reputable resources and thought leadership for K-12 teachers. They feature an extensive list of links to resources for all things social-emotional learning. In addition to worksheets, you can access lesson plans, printables, study resources, and much more.
Browse worksheets on TeacherVision
Education.com features a wide database of resources that exercise hundreds of skills. This is a K-5 website that offers plenty of lesson plans and free printables that support social-emotional learning instruction.
Browse worksheets on Education.com
Did you know that social-emotional learning compliments restorative practices in schools? That’s because both concentrate on healing relationships and seeking solutions to problems that benefit everyone. If you enjoyed these selections above, you’ll love the activities and suggestions you’ll find in our popular book Restorative Practices: Better Outcomes Through Solution Fluency.
This info-packed educator's guide explores how the problem-solving power of Solution Fluency harmonizes with the restorative practices model of conflict resolution in today's modern schools. It includes worksheets, scenarios, teaching tools, and more—everything you need to support social-emotional learning and conflict resolution the right way.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally published Aug 8, 2019, updated September 19, 2021