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

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