Life Success
For Students With Learning Disabilities:
A Teacher Guide

Additional Activities: Emotional Coping Strategies

Recognizing Stress in Others

• Have students list the members of their family.
• Have them write (dictate, tape) 1-3 things about each of them that indicates he/she is feeling a lot of stress.
• Have students share what they wrote/dictated/taped and list them on the board.
• Point out how different people express stress differently; also point out commonalities.

Recognizing Stress in Yourself – Deck of Stress Cards

• Point out that stress means experiencing a strong negative emotion.  The negative emotions are anger, fear and sadness.
• Ask the group the following questions about each negative emotion:
• How does your body feel when you are ______?
• What situations makes you feel _______?
• What do you feel like doing when you are ______?
• What do you feel like saying when you are ______?
• What are some ways you get over feeling ______?
• Write anger, sadness, and fear as headings on the board and list students’ responses to the last question on the board under each heading.
• Prepare a deck of color-coded cards of solutions for each negative emotion.
• Have students pick a card of the appropriate color from the deck and read it aloud when experiencing that emotion. 
• Allow students to keep choosing cards until they find one that they want to try or think will be effective.
• Tell students that later they can come up and draw appropriate cards when they are experiencing that emotion in the future.

Next: Activities Worksheets