Puppy Day Jitters Anchor Book Lesson Plans | Social-Emotional Learning Activities for Back-to-School | Printable Teacher Resource

Help your students name their feelings, build classroom community, and ease those first-day jitters with these ready-to-use Anchor Book Lesson Plans designed around the picture book Puppy Day Jitters (Pawsome Pals series) by Shannon Mori and illustrated by Ada Rowneski.
This colorful 7-page printable pack gives you six engaging, cross-curricular activities that turn the story into meaningful social-emotional learning experiences. Perfect for preschool, kindergarten, and early elementary classrooms, counseling groups, or homeschool.

What’s Included
Six complete lesson plans, each with clear objectives, materials lists, skills targeted, and assessment ideas:
1. Writing – Students write a letter to their teacher sharing feelings about the new school year, one important fact about themselves, and the emotion that goes with it.
2. Math – Count & Tally: Students identify emotions in the book, tally how many times each appears, and discover which feeling showed up the most.
3. Science – Color Emotion Tubes: A fun baking-soda + vinegar eruption experiment using paper-roll “emotion tubes” with matching facial expressions and colors.
4. Art – Watercolor Mood Painting: Students paint a current mood or emotion, then add facial expressions once dry.
5. Social Studies – Classroom Community Web: Students share their name and current feeling while creating a physical yarn web that shows how everyone is connected.
6. Dramatic Play – Feeling Charades: Students act out emotion cards so classmates can practice reading nonverbal cues and using emotion vocabulary.

Why Teachers Love These Plans
• Builds emotional vocabulary and self-awareness
• Strengthens classroom community from day one
• Mixes literacy, math, science, art, and social skills
• Low-prep, high-engagement activities that use common classroom materials
• Clear objectives and simple assessment points make them easy to implement or adapt

Perfect For
• Back-to-school / first-week-of-school lessons
• Social-emotional learning (SEL) blocks
• Morning meetings or counseling groups
• Homeschool families using the book as an anchor text
Instant digital download – Print the pages you need and go!

Pair these lesson plans with the book Puppy Day Jitters for a complete, heart-centered start to the school year. Your students (and their big feelings) will thank you!