Read Alouds for young teen to teach emotional intelligence

[bethben]

Are there suggestions for books for a young teen (boy) that would help to teach emotion?  I know books are a way to teach children things they wouldn't already experience.  How about teaching about emotions?  

[nixpix5]

If you look at Michelle Garcia Winners stuff on social thinking you might find some recommendations on her site. Now I am going to go off on a tangent because I love this topic:

 

My favorite way to teach emotional intelligence to young people is reading books that trigger emotion. When I work with kids who have ASD so often they gravitate towards non fiction. For the longest time I thought it was because they were bright, narrow focused, etc etc. What I ultimately realized was that understanding emotion in books was hard. They just didn't get it. They couldn't read between the emotional lines and had a hard time not only perspective taking with the main character but also seeing other points of view of supporting characters. For them it was like sitting down with no physics background and reading Hawking.

 

I started doing out loud reading of books with gently increasing levels of emotion and then discussing that aspect with them. "Hmmmm...that is an interesting response to his friend, why do you suppose he did that?" And then diagramming out view points and filling in possible back stories of characters that might contribute to a response like that. I would even say "what if he would have said this? How would the response been different?" "Do you see any clues from body language and internal thought that is contrary to what he said to that person? Why wasn't he honest with his feelings? Why is he holding back?" Etc...whatever is relevant to the story.

 

For neurotyoucal kids that either need more emotional sandpaper to develop emotional grit or become inoculated; to experiencing an emotion in a safe way or the antithesis...they are truncated and immature emotionally and need to think deeper, I would choose a number of books that strike in the area where growth or practice is needed. Then read and deconstruct together.

 

The problem with curriculum that hits on socio-emotional such as "how to develop perseverance" and the like is that we don't learn that way. We learn emotional intelligence through practice and experiencing it. Think about any time you have attended a seminar. You get a big book of cool stuff and they tell you how to take it back and implement it. You are Gung ho, you can see it would work, yet you have zero clue how to actually do it. 3 months later it has drifted from your brain as a cool seminar you once learned about.

 

Reading well written, emotionally intelligent characters experiencing emotions we can feel as if we are experiencing it but then we can walk away...well that is practice. That is inoculation. That tells us how to do it when we face it later in life. Best curriculum you can have. Think about what you want your student to work on and then think about Socratic style questions and interesting angles to take it.

[Farrar]

I agree with Nixpix and I think that's maybe what you have in mind. I would just look for books about emotionally rich issues (family drama, death, love, bullying, discrimination, etc.) with a diverse set of characters. But really, any of the quality "required reading" type books is going to be in that vein. The light pleasure reading stuff - spy dystopian vampire romance stuff isn't so much, but the award winners and the like. If you give us an idea of what he already likes to read, that might point the way.