SECOND STEP Extension Activities for Middle School
Brain-Body-Emotion Activities
The brain plays a major role in how your middle school students process emotions. Brain Awareness Week is a great time to help students transfer the learning from SECOND STEP emotion-management lessons to real-life situations.
One way to excite your students about learning more about emotion management and the brain is by using activities that help them understand connections between the brain, the body, and emotions.
The following activities are from our new SECOND STEP middle school program.
Grade 6, Lesson 8: Emotion Management: Emotions—Brain and Body
Health and Science
Do Animals Have Emotions?
Do animals have emotions? Or do humans project their own emotions onto animals? Divide students into groups. Have each group research these questions (using preselected Web sites or search engines), focusing on a different animal species (such as dogs, dolphins, pigs, or reptiles). Compare the ways animal and human brains process information and feel emotions. Have students report to the other groups what they found out about the animal they researched.
Media Literacy
How Do Images and Sound in Advertisements Influence How You Feel?
Explain to students that images are processed in the same "primitive" part of the brain where strong emotions and instincts are located, but that written and spoken language is processed in the cerebral cortex, the "thinking" part of the brain.
First have students listen only to the sound of a TV advertisement that you have recorded. How does it make them feel? Do they want to buy the product? Now show them the same ad with the sound and the images. Does it make them feel any different? Why or why not? In what ways do they think advertisements encourage "impulse" buying? What can they do to control those impulses?
Grade 7, Lesson 8: Emotion Management: Understanding Anger
Health and Science
What Are the Physical Effects of Uncontrolled Anger?
Have students work in groups to research the body's physiological response to uncontrolled anger using preselected Web sites or search engines. Have groups report their findings, then discuss the following questions: How might this response help us in some situations? How does this response hinder us?
Media Literacy
What Makes You Angry?
Preselect several print, TV, or Web-based advertisements that may make some people angry, such as fast-food chains targeting children, partisan political ads, tobacco and alcohol ads that appeal to teens, unrealistically thin models selling products, or sexually explicit ads.
Have students work in groups. Have each group choose one of the ads, then discuss the following questions: Who might this ad make angry? What about the ad might anger someone? What are some possible negative responses to this ad by an angry viewer? How can an angry viewer control his or her anger? What are some possible responses to this ad by an angry viewer that could cause positive change? Have each group report their responses to the class.
Your can get additional activities to do during Brain Awareness Week. Brain Awareness Week is organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and the Society for Neuroscience.
Rachel Kamb
Program Developer
Committee for Children
