Today's SEL theme was resilience. I shouldn't be surprised that only 2 of my 16 homeroom students had heard of the word. No one knew exactly what it meant but we figured that out together.
The lesson asked students to write 2 positive emotions and 1 negative emotion they've experienced recently on a piece of paper. Past lessons have taught me that my homeroom students have a limited vocabulary when it comes to explaining their emotions, so I found a resource to help them identify what they've been feeling.
The last part of the lesson asked them to take their paper and fold it up to make a paper airplane so we could fly it around to one part of the classroom. Then students would choose a paper that was not theirs to see if they felt similar emotions to the ones that flew to them.
It was then that I discovered that 95% of my homeroom students did not know how to make a paper airplane. I found that statistic to be even more shocking than when I realized they don't know what resilience means.