Social and Emotional Learning
Social and Emotional learning is a big part of our curriculum at Creswell. From mindfulness to rewarding students for positive behavior choices, we are teaching the whole child. Social and emotional learning is the process that adults and children learn to recognize and manage emotions, establish and maintain positive and healthy relationships, make good decisions and behave ethically and responsibly. All classes and teachers incorporate this into their teaching, we also do morning meetings every day.
There are a few apps we use for communication and encouragement of positive behavior. As a parent, you can download the apps and keep track of your student's progress.
See how MNPS has incorporated social and emotional learning.
Liveschool
As part of our SEL and positive behavior support program, we use Liveschool to reward students for making responsible and respectful choices while at school. Teachers can reward these points through out the day in all areas of the school, even our office staff and support staff can award points. Students also receive demerits when they make irresponsible or disrespectful choices. These points are not deducted from their overall total, but are tracked separately.
Every couple weeks students can visit our Virtual (for now) Liveschool Store, where they can use their points to purchase items such as passes to wear hats to class, candy, paint kits, pencil pouches, backpacks and much more!
At the end of each month we host a school-wide, virtual (for now) reward. Prior to COVID-19, these rewards included things like pep rallies, dance parties and special assemblies with guests such as performers. Our virtual school-wide rewards had to pivot a little, but we have found a way to all be "together" for the time being, while still rewarding our students for their positive choices.
Creswell Houses
A few years ago, we started our Creswell House System - think similar to that wizard movie. Students were placed into houses based on their arts classes. Every student, teacher and staff member at our school was a member of a house. Once a month our houses would meet for an hour to play games, work on SEL skills, and just have fun. The neat thing about this is that our students 5-8th got the chance to be together, it was a great opportunity for 7th and 8th graders to become mentors and for our 5th and 6th graders to have an older student in the building that they know. It was also great for teachers to get to see students outside of those they teacher. We can't wait until we can all be in a space together again!
