Connecting Students Across The Globe
Children from across the world are eager to connect, learn and grow with each other. The SELENA Connections program facilitates those activities.
Prejudice, racism and discrimination easily seep into a community. To combat such behaviors, the SELENA Connections program facilitates interactions between students. Under teacher supervision, students have the opportunity to establish life long friendships with students across the globe. The program is designed to enable students to learn Social Emotional Learning topics, after students have had a chance to connect on an individual level, get to know one another and play educational video games together.
The implementation of the program is intended for Kindergarten through 12th grade but can be adjusted for high school graduates.
3 Activities Lead To Unlimited Opportunities
This is how it works. Students have three different opportunities to interact with other students in different cultures.
1. Google Meet - Face to Face Conversations
Students will have an opportunity to “meet” each other face to face via Google Meet. The Resilience, Inc program manager will facilitate conversations between the two groups. Students are urged to ask each other questions and will also be given a list of prepared questions they can ask each other. The prepared questions relate to social emotional learning topics, and sample question topics include:
- Food
- Video Games
- Family
- Clothes
- Videos
- Places to visit
- Sports
- Music/Dancing
- Books/Reading
- Friendships
2. Pen Pal Writing Exercises
Students will be connected with a Pen Pal in a foreign country, and encouraged to write about a variety of topics, to include:
- Food
- Video Games
- Family
- Clothes
- Videos
- Places to visit
- Sports
- Music/Dancing
- Books/Reading
- Friendships
3. SELENA VR - Educational Learning Experiences
Students can practice the core topics of social emotional learning through a VR (virtual reality) experience that helps to overcome fear and anxiety. Following their VR experience, students can meet face to face with other students through Google Meet, to discuss their reactions. Mutual experiences tend to establish bonds, and reveal human qualities that all cultures and all ages experience.
