The following Emotional Intelligence activity can be done with students in grade 4 and higher.

The students have to make a list of their 10 most important things to them. This list is not to include food, air, shelter or the basic things of life since they are important to everyone. Now that they have their 10 items, they have to cross off 3 of them, and when that is done, they have to cross off another 3 from the list. The list can be hard enough to make, but it becomes harder when the student has to cross off 6 items, all told, from their list. It takes a lot of thinking and judging as to what is important to them. Of course this activity can be adjusted to the class. After, they have done this work, they can write a reflection about the task and tell how the list had been made and how the list was shortened.

"Invalidation may be the most damaging form of psychological abuse." (http://eqi.org/invalid.htm) This is a very interesting article because we are all guilty of trying to talk someone out of their feelings. How many of us are guilty of the following statements:

There are a lot more examples where we try to minimize someone else's feelings, We recommend this article and see how guilty we all are. We highly recommend taking the time to look at the site http://eqi.org for other information regarding Emotional Intelligence. It has practical suggestion for teachers about managing your own emtions so that you can help students manage their own emotions.

This was the type of activity discussed after our PD night on Emotional Intelligence.