Families of students at John Philip Sousa Elementary School, in the Port Washington School District, recently explored emotions and feelings through several activities using the RULER approach with its First Annual Family RULER Night.
Sousa Elementary School hosted a family engagement night that included dance moves, guessing games, meditation techniques and other fun ways to navigate the psychological approach to social and emotional learning.
“Port Washington values the importance of students identifying and understanding their feelings in order to help them learn how to create a positive environment for themselves and empathize with one another,” said Superintendent of Schools Dr. Michael Hynes. “Our family engagement night is an excellent and fun way for families to learn about the RULER approach to social and emotional learning.”
Dr. Marc Brackett, the Co-Founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and creator of the RULER approach, spoke with parents about the importance of understanding emotions and before families visited several stations of fun activities using the RULER approach.
“This school has been working with our center for about eight or nine years and it’s pretty remarkable when you see something that you’ve worked on for so long be done so well in another place,” said Dr. Marc Brackett.
“I didn’t go to a school that cared about feelings, I didn’t go to a school where teachers built classroom charts that asked me how I feel and I certainly didn’t go to a school where people taught me anything about how to deal with my feelings. I’m just blown away by how much dedication Principal Meg Sheehan, Counselor Jenn Biblowitz and everyone in the District puts into this.”
Students danced to the moods of different songs in one station and another asked students to pick an emotion and act it out for their parents to guess. Another station included a giant mood meter, used in the RULER approach and asked students to fill it in with different emotions in different languages.
Meanwhile, at the regulation station, students explored different ways to ease stress and tension using meditation and other sensory tools. Before leaving, students visited the selfie station, where they expressed themselves in front of a green screen for a photo with friends.
RULER is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence (recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating).
Earlier in 2022, Sousa Elementary School was named one of six schools internationally to become a RULER mentor school by the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence. “RULER Mentor Schools are recognized for their expertise and their ingenuity with RULER implementation. These are schools who we would say have infused the principles of RULER, emotional intelligence and social, emotional learning into their DNA or immune system of their school,” said Dr. Marc Brackett.
For more information about the Port Washington Union Free School District, please visit the district’s website at www.portnet.org and ‘like’ our Facebook page: @PortWashSchools.
