The RULER program has become an integral part of our social and emotional learning.  As we are always trying to find better ways to help our children solve conflicts, we hope that teaching these skills can help them to better understand and manage their emotions.  This is what RULER stands for:

Since the beginning of the school year, we have been discussing feelings and emotion words. Students are learning how to label their emotions.  As a class, we voted on the words that we felt were important to us.  They were able to narrow them down to three words that they felt were most important to them.

Using these three words, we created our classroom charter.  Our statement reads:

“We want to feel safe, peaceful, and included.”

Students also drew pictures about their feeling words.  Here are three examples.

In conflict situations, I often relate back to our classroom charter. If someone forgets to clean up a mess on the floor, I would ask if this was a “safe” thing to do.  Students would say that someone could slip on the mess, fall and hurt themselves.

By increasing our students’ social skills and emotional intelligence, we can build a classroom culture that encourages positive relationships.  For more information on RULER, here is their website:  http://ei.yale.edu/ruler/