Middle School Social Emotional Learning Thematic Unit Plans

Engage your students in a powerful and comprehensive 18-day thematic unit on bullying designed for grades 5-8. This multimedia-rich resource explores the critical issue of bullying through a variety of formats, ensuring student engagement and fostering social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. Perfect for humanities teachers, long-term substitute teachers, and SEL specialists, this unit is adaptable, rigorous, and impactful.

What's Inside:

• Day-by-Day Lesson Plans: Detailed and easy-to-follow, these plans guide students through an exploration of bullying using films, short stories, political cartoons, informational texts, and poetry.

• Multimedia Integration: Your students will analyze media such as:

• Short films on bullying for visual storytelling.

• Fiction texts like Pumpkin Head to explore bullying in literature.

• Political cartoons to understand the societal impact of bullying.

• Popular films like Matilda to discuss character responses to bullying.

• Songs that discuss themes of bullying and resilience.

• Socratic Seminars: Two thought-provoking Socratic seminars that allow students to dive deeper into themes of bullying, fostering critical thinking, discourse, and empathy.

• Assessments: Include graded one-pager projects, Socratic seminar rubrics, and a STAAR-aligned extended constructive response essay on bullying prevention, ensuring students develop strong reading, writing, and analytical skills.

• Capstone Project: Students will culminate their learning by creating an infographic on bullying, highlighting key facts such as types of bullying, its effects, and prevention strategies. This capstone promotes research, creativity, and advocacy.

Why You'll Love It:

• Flexible Use: Perfect for SEL lessons, English Language Arts, and humanities classes. This unit can also be used by long-term substitutes for a fully developed curriculum that's ready to go.
• Multimedia and Interdisciplinary: Engage students with a range of media, ensuring both visual and auditory learners are captivated. From analyzing cartoons to films, this unit provides cross-curricular opportunities.
• Builds SEL Skills: Through various activities, students learn empathy, kindness, and strategies to combat bullying. It’s not just an academic unit, but a character-building experience.
• Fully Scaffolds Learning: Differentiated activities, visual aids, and pre-made assessments make this unit accessible to a wide range of student abilities, including ELLs and students with IEPs.

Who It's For:

• Humanities Teachers: Add depth to your curriculum with an SEL-focused unit that fits seamlessly into English, history, or social studies classes.
• SEL Coordinators: This unit emphasizes empathy, communication, and kindness, key components of any social-emotional learning program.
• Long-Term Substitutes: Take the guesswork out of planning with a ready-to-use, high-quality unit that ensures continuity in learning while building essential skills.

Make bullying prevention and social-emotional learning an integral part of your classroom with this well-rounded, 18-day multimedia unit. Equip your students with the tools to recognize, stand up against, and prevent bullying in their school community.

Add to your cart now and inspire positive change in your students' lives!

This product focuses on the following areas:

This mental health curriculum includes suggested activities and tips to support mental health education and instruction for students in 4th through 7th Grade. Depending on students ability levels, this product could be used in 3rd - 9th grade as well.

Self Management - This product includes a teacher guide for self-management, promote self-care for mental and emotional health, identify what emotionally and mentally healthy means, self-management ideas and activities, creating a mindful classroom, mindful moments, identifying your feelings, experiencing feelings in our bodies, identify how we felt in the past when we were stressed, angry, frustrated, etc., a teacher guide for resiliency - learn ways to manage stress, improve self-esteem, and recognize failures and non-successes, listening to my negative voice, listening to my positive voice, discussing negative and positive voice scenarios, resiliency building amongst the group, a teacher guide for feelings - discuss 30 feelings cards, write in the learning journal - feelings, emotional, and mental health that include positive and negative feelings and when they were felt in the past.

Relationships - This product includes a teacher guide for communication in relationships - communication skills - verbally or nonverbally, communicating effectively, teacher guide for assertive statements activities, assertive statements notebook for students to fill out, answer questions regarding aggression, examples of aggression, how students handled aggression in the past is asked and discussed, being assertive instead of aggressive, examples of being passive, assertive, and aggressive, how to communicate assertively - eye contact, clear conversation, facial expression, etc., examples of aggressive and assertive responses to show students the difference, students will play charades that focuses on feelings - students can play in a small group or a large group, feeling cards are included in this product, empathy, compassion, and acceptance are included in this product as well, students will learn about personal space and boundaries, they can fill in the packet called, My Personal Space Bubble, students will act out and write out how close is too close to have a conversation, how they felt when they were too close to a friend, the importance of staying in your own personal space bubble, how you could make others feel if you do not stay in your own personal space bubble, reading body language, what someone's body language is telling you and why that is important, the 4 zones of space are discussed - intimate - hugging and whispering, personal - with close friends and family, social space - conversations with acquaintances, and public space - public speaking space, students will answer questions about their personal space bubble, students will learn about compassion and can fill out the Compassion Journal included in the product, students will learn what compassion is, students are provided with examples of how they can show compassion, students will learn about gratitude and forgiveness and how they benefit one's mental health and relationship building, students can complete a 7 day I'm Grateful Because journal that includes prompts to answer as to why they are grateful, students can participate in the Grateful Scavenger Hunt and answer questions aloud or write their answers down to 14 different things they could be grateful for, and students will learn about the four part apology in this product - apologize, take responsibility, how will this be resolved, and ask for forgiveness. Teachers can use this packet as a guide while have conversations with students or teachers can have students fill out the packets that are included.

Resource Management - This product includes a teacher guide for resource management to help students identify and express a variety of feelings by rating their feelings on a scale of 0 - 10, students will identify very strong feelings and how they may feel a feeling a little bit or not at all, when students feel angry what they can do, sharing with students that it is okay to feel angry, upset, etc., but what it is not okay to do, coping with upsetting feelings, when to ask for help, recognize when a situation needs help, filling out a feelings survival kit (tips are included), where to ask for help, who in your school you can talk to and trust, understanding what trusting someone means, trust activities that help studies build trust, questions for social workers, counselors, or psychologists, how to ask for help from people that students trust, how people you trust can help you when you feel angry or upset, and when should students ask for help.

You may be interested in the following individual products:

Self-Management Activities and Tips:

https://www.TeachShare.com/Product/Self-Management-Activities-and-Tips-9508834

Mental Health Communication in Relationships Activities and Tips:

https://www.TeachShare.com/Product/Mental-Health-Communication-in-Relationships-Activities-and-Tips-9569892

Mental Health Expressing Feelings Activities:

https://www.TeachShare.com/Product/Mental-Health-Expressing-Feelings-Activities-9576695

Gratitude Activities:

https://www.TeachShare.com/Product/Gratitude-Activities-9753926

Explore themes of equity, disabilities, and resilience with this dynamic resource bundle designed for grades 5-8!

1. 18-Day Disabilities & Equity Unit (Grades 6+): This comprehensive unit includes engaging projects, thought-provoking essays, rigorous assessments, and Socratic seminars to help students explore visible and invisible disabilities, equity in schools, and societal challenges. Perfect for deepening understanding and fostering empathy in your classroom.
2. Out of My Mind Movie Guide and Activities (Grades 5+): Dive deeper into Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind with this movie guide and activity pack! Students will analyze characters, themes, and key scenes while practicing critical thinking and reflection skills.

This bundle is ideal for educators looking to combine standards-aligned instruction with meaningful, real-world themes. Save time and inspire your students with these ready-to-use resources!