With Valentine's Day approaching, it's a great time to talk to your elementary students about all kinds of healthy emotions and feelings, and treating others with kindness and respect. Use the entire week of Valentine's Day to boost your students' social and emotional learning. A recent emphasis on social and emotional learning may be related to language in the Every Student Succeeds Act that makes provisions for schools to count social and emotional growth toward their improvement strategies.

Try a search in your school's ISearch for "social-emotional learning" and look at the Basic and Advanced Sources tabs and the STEM tab to find lots of recent research on the topic of social and emotional learning.

A recent issue of School Library Journal includes a list of picture books that support students' social and emotional learning.

Pair those picture books listed in School Library Journal with age-appropriate magazine articles on similar subjects. How can you find the picture books and related texts? Search in your school's ISearch for the title of the books on the list. You are likely to find many in your school library. You'll find the book "Each Kindness" by Jacqueline Woodson in BookFlix from INFOhio. BookFlix titles appear on your "My Library" tab in ISearch.

Encourage students to read the paired non-fiction in BookFlix, "Kindness and Generosity: It Starts with Me!" Struggling readers can make use of the Read Aloud feature in BookFlix.

Find related, age-appropriate articles from magazines like "Highlights" or "Boys Life" on the Basic Sources tab in ISearch. Search ISearch for a term like kindness. Make it easier to get the results you want by using the filters that appear along the left side of the ISearch results screen. For example, after searching for kindness, limit results on the Basic Sources tab to Subject: Kindness, Source Type: Magazines, and Journal: Highlights.

Click the View/Download button to get to the full text of any of the remaining results.