I Like Being Me
I Like Being Me by Judy Lalli, is a fantastic book to read for your poetry unit. Not only is it great to teach about poetry, but the contents are also wonderful for social emotional learning. If being used for a poetry unit, you could do a deep dive and cover a poem a day. I prefer to use it to focus on the social emotional learning and sprinkle in the poetry throughout the year. This way I can keep the social emotional topics at the forefront.
The first poem in the book, I Can Choose, is about having a winning attitude. A lot of students, especially younger ones, struggle with losing. Some kids might even have an emotional meltdown, when they lose a game. To avoid dealing with these types of behaviors, some teachers will opt out of playing games, or only play games where everyone can experience being a winner. While these approaches are okay in the very beginning, they will not serve a purpose in the long run. It’s important for students to learn that everyone can’t win every game. Losing a game does not make you a loser. Although winning is fun, the focus of playing a game can be on having fun, enjoying the activity, and being motivated to try harder next time.
While discussing the meaning of this poem you can talk about how it feels to win and how it feels to lose? What it means to have a winning attitude? Role playing is a great way to model desired behaviors. When role playing, as the teacher, take on the negative role. If you are the one pretending to be a sore loser, crying, stomping your feet, and having a fit, first and foremost, kids are going to be laughing and having fun. That being said, the message will come across loud and clear. Talking about normalizing the feelings associated with losing a game and thinking through on actionable steps on how to act will be very helpful.
After a class discussion and some role playing, come up with a list of things students can say or do, to exemplify a winning attitude. When complete, reference that list often. Make a big deal whenever students are modeling one of the positive behaviors.
If you have a particular student struggling with losing. Play some one-on-one games where you intentionally lose. Think out loud and express how you are unhappy that you lost and ask the student to give you ideas on how you can act and what you can do when you feel this way. If you’ve used the class list before, the student will most likely reference that list as well.
After modeling this behavior a few times, play games where the student experiences losing and be right there to scaffold the proper responses. Depending on the students ability, you can jump in before the meltdown and start scaffolding. You can say something like, “I see Mikel is getting ready to show a winning attitude, I wonder what behavior Mikel is going to choose from our list.” You can directly ask Mikel, “Do you want to say congratulations? Do you want to smile?” Make a big deal on the great job Mikel did, with whatever he chose.
Continue these types of experiences until your students have mastered this very important skill.
Here's an example of what your class list could look like:
If you’d like to get the detailed lesson plan for this lesson, with additional rhyming activities, you can grab it here.
