Test Anxiety: What is it and what can you do about it?

This lesson works best with students who are older (5th grade and up)

I begin by telling the students that we will be talking about test anxiety and that they will complete a checklist to see how much test anxiety they have. I give them the Test Anxiety Self-Assessment and let them complete it on their own. I then tell them to count up the number of checks they have in the usually and sometimes categories and add them together to get a number. If the number is 10 or higher they have some test anxiety. The higher the number the more test anxiety they have. I make sure to tell them that this is not a good or bad thing, it just gives them more information about themselves. 

I then use the power point Test Anxiety to talk about what test anxiety is and give them some tips on dealing with it.

Don't Pop Your Top

Don’t Pop Your Top

Read Julia Cook’s book “Soda Pop Head.”

Show class a poster with the three anger rules on it:

Do not hurt yourself

Do not hurt others

Do not hurt property

Use a balloon to demonstrate how anger can keep building until it explodes. You will bring out a balloon and have the students raise their hands and tell you things that make them angry. You can either blow the balloon up until it actually pops or you can discreetly poke it with a tack or safety pin. Tell the class that this is what happens when we don’t deal with our anger in the right way. Just like the balloon, there is only so much we can take and at some point you end up exploding.

Next have the students brainstorm some ways that they can deal with their anger while following the three rules. Give them the Don’t Pop: Ways to Handle YourAnger worksheet. While they are doing this, blow up another balloon.

Ask students to tell you some of the ways they came up with to deal with anger. For each correct strategy, let some air out of the balloon. Tell students that by doing something to help themselves calm down, they will relieve a little bit of the pressure on themselves so that they don’t pop.

Feelings Jenga

Feelings Jenga

This is an activity I use with small groups.

I got this idea from the book "Teaching Children Empathy, The Social Emotion" which is a great resource if you are looking for something specifically on empathy.  Simply take a Jenga game and write feeling words on them. The students play the game like regular Jenga except that when they pull a block they must read the word (or have me read it) and tell about a time they felt that way or, if they can not think of a time, something that could make them feel that way. Like with anything else, do not pressure students to provide an answer if they do not want to. 

 I have used this activity with my empathy small group, social skills small group and self-esteem small group but I think it would work great for almost any small group regardless of topic.

If Everybody Did

If Everybody Did

This is a lesson that I do in Kindergarten but could be done with older students too. 

Read book "If Everybody did" by Jo Ann Stover

Tell students that they are going to add to the story. Hand out a page from If Everybody Did book extension to each student. With Kindergarten students you may have to tell them what their page says. Tell them that they can be creative with their page and either use black and white like the author did or add color to their picture. Once most of the students are finished, have students with the same page all come up and display to their classmates their ideas about what would happen if everybody did.

Don't Squeal Unless It's A Big Deal

Don't Squeal Unless It's A Big Deal

This is a lesson that I do with second grade

 

Read the story "Don't Squeal Unless It's A Big Deal: A Tale of Tattletales" by Jeanie Franz Ransom. 

After reading the story, show students your poster with the pig on it (I just found a picture of a pig on the internet and pasted it into a word doc then printed it poster size on pink paper. Make sure to cut off the pig's tail) along with the two tails for the pig. One should say Tattle and the other should be blank. Students will then draw a pin the tail on the tattle tail card. If the card indicates a situation the student considers to be tattling then he will pin the tattle tail onto the pig. If the situation is a time when you should tell then the student pins the regular tail on the pig. I blindfold the students with a sleeping mask and let them use double stick tape to "pin" the tail so that it is not dangerous.