Social Awareness Teaching Resources

Help your students build social awareness skills with activities and printables, social skills worksheets and more SEL teaching resources created by teachers specifically for elementary and middle school students.

This collection is full of digital and printable activities created by the expert teachers of the Teach Starter team to help teachers as they work with students on being more socially aware, recognize social cues, understand social dynamics and treat the people around them with kindness and courtesy.

Each teaching resource in this social awareness teaching resource collection has undergone rigorous review by the Teach Starter team to ensure it's ready for the classroom ... and your students!

Curious about teaching social awareness and wondering how to build students' social skills? Read on for some tips from our expert teachers!

What Is Social Awareness? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Being socially aware is not something that comes naturally to every child, and explaining what social awareness means can be tough. Our teacher team has created this kid-friendly definition to help!

Social awareness is understanding how other people feel and what they need. When we are socially aware, we notice how others are doing, and we make an effort to be kind and helpful to them.

Social awareness also means paying attention to the rules and ways people behave in different situations.

Being socially aware means we are more sensitive to the feelings of people around us, and we can then use our social skills — such as the ability to be kind, to listen and to cooperate – to work with others. It means we can empathize with others, understand diverse perspectives and navigate social interactions effectively.

Social Awareness Examples for Kids

Now that you've explained the social awareness meaning, it helps to explore what it actually looks like when you put it into practice. Many of your students may have at least some skills already at hand — depending on the individual student and grade level.

A kindergartner, for example, may show empathy by giving a crying friend a hug or sharing a toy, but they're typically not yet able to understand that people have different perspectives.

So how can your students show they're socially aware? Let's look at some kid-friendly social awareness examples!

1. Taking turns on the playground or at the water fountain.
2. Sharing crayons or gluesticks with classmates.
3. Making eye contact with friends when they're speaking.
4. Paying attention when a teacher is speaking and not interrupting.
5. Collaborating with classmates to complete a group assignment.
6. Using conflict resolution skills to address issues with a friend.
7. Offering to help the gym teacher put away the basketballs or helping the school librarian shelve the books that have been left out by other students.

What Is the Difference Between Self Awareness and Social Awareness?

We teach students both self awareness and social awareness in elementary and middle school, and the two relate to one another as important aspects of emotional intelligence.

But where social awareness is focused outward on the emotions, perspectives and needs of others, self awareness focuses inward on recognizing those concepts in oneself.

Social Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an umbrella term that involves a number of the core components of a social emotional learning curriculum — including self awareness, self management and relationship management, as well as social awareness.

So how does social awareness specifically tie back to emotional intelligence? Being emotionally intelligent involves not just recognizing emotions in one's self but in others — the basic component of social awareness for our students.

Take social dynamics, for example. Understanding the social dynamics at play in a particular situation is a big part of being socially aware. Recognizing group norms, cultural differences and power dynamics all help our students to avoid causing offense or discomfort in others. It's a great example of having the emotional intelligence required to navigate a situation!