Cooperative Learning and Team Building Activities that Focus on Social and Emotional Learning
Character is Cool Skillastics® creatively integrats character traits such as sportsmanship, respect, responsibility, teamwork, caring and honesty into the celebrated Skillastics® technique. Each of the 26 physical activities are associated with a specific character trait, allowing instructors to build on each character trait, helping students to become their best selves and to achieve their best work. The physical activities for children that are included in this cooperative learning environment provide the tools for each child to strive for.
The digital mindfulness lessons individually highlight each of the 26 activities. The mindfulness specialist talks about the activity, why it’s associated with the character trait, and elaborates on lessons that can be learned from the experience. This 5–7-minute mindfulness lesson balances movement and SEL perfectly. It even allows students the option of journaling about the experience.
Watch it in Action!
Character is Cool. Has everything that you need to get your kids moving, having fun while they’re learning and displaying better character traits with character is cool. Your students are gonna be learning activities that are linked to character traits. So while they’re learning these fun activities, they’re gonna be learning and connecting with character traits that relate to those activities. How do we do this? Well, we’ve pulled in a mindfulness specialist who will talk to your kids for you, teach them about these character traits, and then even relate it to their lives.
How do we get these kids to talk about these character traits? Well, at the end of every one of these lessons, this mindfulness specialist prompts the children with questions that they can either do in small group work, or it can be led by your staff. Now, your students are gonna be going over things like sportsmanship, respect, caring, and compassion, teamwork, responsibility, honesty. All of these lessons that are, are helping our kids to grow with better character.
So please click the link below so that we can partner with you to bring you powerful character lessons with fitness fun to your program.
I’m gonna share with you how the celebrated skillastics technique works. You lay this oversized mat in the middle of a plain area. You take the same color dice and beanbag markers and lay them on the same color start button on the oversized mat. You take a group of kids and divide them into six teams, assigning each team of color, and then you put the teams away from this big mat. Each team gets a miniature mat in their team area as a reference.
When the kids are in their team area, you have them number off so they know how to take turns. The way it starts is you just say, go or turn on music, and the first child from each team comes running to their color. So six kids come running to their color, they roll their dice, whatever they roll, they land on an activity they look at, look at the activity, run back to their group, point it out on the miniature mat, and everybody in that group has to do that activity together.
How many repetitions do they do? Well on each activity, there’s three different colored numbers on the bottom. They represent beginning, intermediate, or advanced repetitions. So before you even start as the instructor, you would say, today group, you’re gonna do the blue amount. So the kids know that whenever they land on an activity, they’re gonna do the blue amount of repetitions. So you’ve got six teams moving independently, but everybody moving, everybody active at one time. Now the worst thing you can do is just lay this out and say play, because the kids are not familiar with the activities yet.
So each of our skillastics activity kits include task cards, and in our instructional manuals, we have so many lead up games and activities that will familiarize the kids with the activities prior to play. Now each of our skillastics activity kits come in these convenient carriage bags. Very easy to store, very easy to transport. This is the foundation of the Skillastics program and all the variations that are a part of it.
Great for:
- Physical Education
- AfterSchool and 21st Century Learning Programs
- Expanded Learning Programs
- Bully Awareness Programs
- Character Education Initiatives
Character is Cool Skillastics® Includes: 
- 5’ x 7’ Oversize Mat
- 6, (20” x 27”) Miniature Mats
- 26, Laminated Task Cards (used for practice and familiarization prior to play)
- Curriculum Unit containing National PE Standards Alignment, Assessments, Rubrics, & Lesson Plans (Download)
- 26, 5-7-Minute Digital Mindfulness Lessons – Project on wall or screen or can be used remotely (Online)
- Colorful, Detailed Instructional Manual (includes assessment exercises) (Download)
- Animated Instructional DVD (includes examples of how to do each of the 26 activities and why each activity is associated with that activity) (Online)
- Talking points that help the instructor expand on the character traits and how they transfer into everyday life.
- 6, Multi-Colored Foam Dice
- 6, Multi-Colored Beanbag Markers
- Convenient Storage Backpack
Targets:
- 3rd thru 8th Grade
Tammy – May 2017 –
This is a great way to do Fitness Skillastics and address character ed topics at the same time. Our students at PRES love being active while playing this life size game. We, as PE teachers, love that we can do this activity with a large group of students and everyone is active together.
Marta –
This is an awesome activity that allows students to be physically active while also learning about positive character traits.
Barbara –
Character development should be embedded in everything we do as physical educators. This activity allows teachers to easily instruct students about various character traits, all while still being activity and having FUN! My district purchased a kit for each of our elementary schools (155) and the teachers have enjoyed having this in their toolbox of awesome instructional materials for quality physical education.