STEAM + SEL: Materials, Sounds, and Feelings

The Mood Meter. A resource from RULER.

The Mood Meter

In the Lower School at TAS, R.U.L.E.R. is our SEL program. A part of this program is using the Mood Meter to recognize and understand our emotions. As we slowly figure out this work with the students, I wanted to see how the program could connect to my work in STEAM, especially with KA (4 year-olds). In their homeroom classes, they currently use The Mood Meter with very simple language, and identify one or two emotion words for an entire color/quadrant:

Materials, Manipulation, and Sound

One of my goals for my youngest students in STEAM is to explore a variety of materials and understand how each can be manipulated and changed in a multitude of ways. By working with different materials and tools, my hope is that these young students will understand how a piece of paper isn’t just for writing or drawing but can but cut, bent, folded, torn, rolled, stuck together with various adhesives, and used for a variety of creation possibilities. I also try to do this with plastic, wood, cardboard, and other found materials.

Our Early Childhood Librarian, Mandy Friedman and I, were having a discussion surrounding forms of wellness activities. Mandy mentioned that ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) videos are popular among groups of people as a source of relaxation. For many others, ASMR produces a more negative response, however, in either instance, sounds can trigger or connect to emotion. With this in mind, Mandy and I decided to find opportunities to use sound in our teaching to make deeper connections between sounds and our feelings.

STEAM

During our first class, I decided to introduce the connection between materials and the sounds they could produce. I placed a few materials like Legos, paper, bubble wrap, and popsicle sticks on each table of the classroom and prepared iPads ready to record video in selfie mode. Students independently chose materials from the table and demonstrated one way they could make sound with that object. Each child was encouraged to try and make two different sounds with each object. Here is one example, click to page 2 to see the second sound.

After this, the students had an opportunity to roam around the classroom to search for other tools or materials that could make sounds. Each time we asked them to tell us how they were making the sound to reinforce language: “I can make a sound by…”

In the second STEAM session, I tried to make the connection to our emotions. Students were encouraged to find objects around their classroom that they felt was a calm, happy, sad, or angry sound. This time the sentence stem was “I can make a _____ sound.” Here is an example:

Library

Mandy describes how she made connections between sounds and emotions in the Library:

The library collaborated with STEAM to discover how sound makes us feel.  We read books with sounds and students predicted what kind of sounds they might hear in a book based on the cover and the title.  When reading a book with ghosts, they thought about how the sounds were meant to make them feel.  We listened to music while we read books with a sense of musicality.  Students were encouraged to participate in creating the sounds and letting their bodies move with them.  Finally, we read books about construction sites and listened to construction sounds.  This led to a conversation on how a sound can be pleasant or unpleasant.  

KA Sound Series

To wrap up this exploration, students from all three KA classes contributed sounds to create a sound series, one video for each quadrant of the Mood Meter.