Emotional Intelligence

This week we have started to look at how our brain works and what is happening in our brain when we react in situations with negative behaviours. We found out that we have a 'learning brain' and an 'emotion brain'. Our learning brain helps us learn new skills and we use it all the time when we are reading, writing and even when we learnt to ride a bike! 

Our emotion brain houses all the feelings that we have ( we found this very interesting as many of us had been to see the movie 'inside out' and could talk about how important our emotions are!) We talked about it was okay to feel angry, sad etc but sometimes our emotion brain can take over our 'learning brain' and that's when we see behaviour like hitting and kicking. 

We learnt that we have nerves that we called 'a bridge' between our 'learning brain' and our emotion brain' and that when we feel strong emotions that may result in negative behaviours we need to 'cross the bridge' to the 'learning brain' and get both sides of our brain working together to help us to use strategies so our emotions don't result in negative behaviour.

We found out that just like riding a bike we would have to practise, practise, practise 'crossing the bridge' and helping our 'learning brain' and 'emotion brain' work together!

We also came up with the feelings that we want to have in our classroom and what our job is and our teacher's jobs are to make sure we are feeling this way in the classroom!

Next week we are going to look at challenges. What emotions we feel when we get stuck and what strategies we can use to move forward.