English Landing students describe monthly "First Fridays" program for social-emotional learning

First Fridays, a monthly program at English Landing Elementary School, gives students a mix of morning activities and cross-grade "family groups" aimed at social-emotional learning, students said. "First Fridays is just a time where we kind of put aside some of the academic and we focus more on, like, the social emotional learning," Student 1 said.

The program pairs an assembly and a morning experience for alternating grade clusters (K–1–2 or 3–4–5) with family-group sessions after the assembly. "We start the morning with experiences. So it's either k 1 2 or 3 4 5 who get to have something special," Student 2 said, citing examples including a magician, a technology team that let students make buttons, career talks from high school students, a veterinary student who brought instruments and vials, and STEM challenges run by parent volunteers.

In the family groups, students from different grades meet with an adult leader to practice the month's character trait and build relationships across classrooms. "We meet once a month after the assemblies, and, we just do activities based around our character words. So this month it's cooperation," Student 1 said. Students described family groups as composed of students from multiple grades and led by a teacher: "It's 2 people from every grade with the teacher," Student 3 said. One student described continuity with a long-term teacher: "My family group teacher is Miss Winkelman. I've I had Miss Winkelman for kindergarten, so she's been a trusted adult for me for a lot of years," Student 5 said.

Students said family-group rituals, such as a "secret signal" or handshake, help them connect to leaders and to other students outside their classrooms. "For our family groups, we all have a, like, a secret signal that they do...little secret handshakes and things just to kind of connect them to someone outside of their classroom," Student 1 said. Students described looking forward to the different activities and the opportunity to be role models: "I like the activities we do and I like being a role model for the little ones," Student 5 said.

The remarks in the transcript describe how English Landing uses the monthly sessions to emphasize a character word each month and to combine team-building games, arts activities (for example, a cooperative mural), and career or STEM exposures as part of students' social-emotional education. The transcript does not include formal school-board motions, funding details, or policy citations for the program; such administrative or budgetary information was not specified.