Animal Related Guidance: Teaching Social Skills Using Pets or Puppets: For Grades 2-5

This resource will bring an animal-loving slant into your guidance lessons and provide you with a collection of more than 100 lessons, reproducible worksheets, games and discussion questions that are ready to use. For some of these lessons, you might find it helpful to bring in a described pet from home. For others, you might be able to use some of the pets found in classrooms in your school. If you cannot find a live animal ambassador you might use puppets, stuffed animals or printed animal images.

Animal-assisted guidance and therapy has been shown to increase empathy for others, acting as a catalyst for the expression of emotions, enhancing self-esteem, improving self-control, expanding social competence, decreasing feelings of stress and diminishing feelings of social isolation.

Unforgettable animal-themed lessons are provided to help children learn about topics such as:

• Attitude
• Self-confidence
• Personal character
• Responsibility
• Empathy
• Problem solving
• Bullying
• Disabilities
• Relaxation
• Resiliency
• Goal setting
• Organization
• Family changes
• Loss
• Career development
• Respect
• Divorce
• Classroom survival skills
• Cooperation/Assertiveness skills