Social/Emotional Development
Research shows that when educators teach children the key skills they need to
understand their emotions and the emotions of others, handle conflicts, problem
solve, and develop relationships with peers, their problem behavior decreases and
their social skills improve (Joseph & Strain 2003).
There are a few key social emotional skills that children need to be successful in school. We will be teaching/promoting the following throughout the school year:
Confidence
Capacity to develop good relationships with peers and adults
Concentration and persistence on challenging tasks
Ability to effectively communicate emotions
Ability to listen to instructions and be attentive
Ability to solve social problems - we specifically teach the steps to solving problems in a variety of ways including engaging children to generate solutions to common classroom challenges: we visual pictures (see example below) and the words to help children identify possible solutions to problems.
In order to promote appropriate behavior in the classroom we:
Constantly teach and refer to our classroom expectations
Provide students with more praise than correction
Talk to students with respect using positive voice tone
Actively engage everyone in the class during instruction
Use pre-correcting, prompting, and redirecting as we teach
Look for the positive first and provide positive, immediate, frequent, and explicit feedback
Here is a wonderful resource for families about social/emotional development: Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning