Lesson Idea | Inside Out and SEL: A Movie Guide and Lesson Plan for Your Classroom

Help students reflect on the social and emotional aspects of the movie and consider how their own emotions work.

Pixar's Inside Out is a movie that's all about feelings, and this makes it perfect for sparking discussions with kids about social and emotional learning. Since the central characters all embody a different emotion, students learn to see parts of themselves or their experiences in each character.

Refreshingly, the movie doesn't make learning about emotions such a heavy-handed endeavor. By getting to know and love each character, students naturally come to understand that emotions are complex, and that we need the entire range of feelings to fully capture the meaning of life experiences.

Things to Know Before You Show Pixar's Inside Out to Your Students

This guide offers two different approaches to teaching Inside Out:
• Show a few specific clips along with discussion questions.
• Show the entire film with a more in-depth lesson plan and handout.

Feel free to use either approach, or even combine the two into one lesson (or an entire unit) based around the movie. If you only have a single class period, showing just a few key clips below might be perfect. If you decide to help students delve deeper into the topic, you might show the entire film and have more extensive discussions over multiple days. Of course, you could also use some combination of the two, adapting the lesson to best suit your class's needs.

Lesson Objectives

This lesson is designed to align with the CASEL 5 competencies for social and emotional learning as well as various thinking routines from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero.

With this lesson, you can help your students:
• Identify their own feelings.
• Think through what it means for emotions to have context.
• Acknowledge the value of having a range of emotions.
• Connect their own personal experiences to the movie's messages.
• Identify their own perspective, and be curious about the perspectives of others.
• Explore the ways they identify their own emotions, including somatically.
• Think about the ways they currently self-regulate, and explore possibilities for other ways.
• Think about helpful versus unhelpful responses to emotions from themselves and others.