This month, we’re going to discuss one of the most important areas of early childhood education: social-emotional skills. This newsletter includes the following:
This research-based guide discusses powerful interactions - moments when a teacher intentionally connects with a child while guiding their learning.
Our main takeaways:
Teachers’ interactions play an important role in children’s social-emotional wellbeing and learning
Positive interactions are validating, personal, respectful and accepting
Ways to help children learn: model curiosity, introduce new vocabulary, encourage thinking, take risks, teach children how to find answers and recognize their current learning and development
Your own self-awareness and emotional intelligence are important in these interactions
Ways to fuel powerful interactions: be genuine, be kind to yourself and be self-reflective
Two parents discuss the importance of co-regulation, which is how adults respond and interact with children to help them navigate and regulate emotions.
The takeaways:
Through co-regulation, a child’s brain wires itself to self-regulate more easily
Ways to co-regulate with your child when they’re upset (and maybe when you’re upset too!)
Get on their level, make eye contact, don’t talk until they’re calm
Take deep, slow breaths and use your senses to center yourself
Sportscast: narrate what’s happening out loud without judgement
When you’re upset, role model for the child: let them know that you need a break for a minute, talk out loud about your regulation strategies
Don’t blame the child for your emotions and let them know you’ll try better next time → This gives them permission to make mistakes too
Remember that co-regulation is time-intensive and social-emotional learning is not linear
This blog post provides some simple ways that you, as a teacher or parent, can model social-emotional skills for the children in your life using the 5 core competencies from CASEL (another great resource for social-emotional learning!).
Our main takeaways:
Self-awareness: intentionally check in with yourself during your day with children and encourage them to be self-reflective too
Self-management: set realistic goals for yourself and share with students or set a common goal for your family
Social awareness: acknowledge others’ emotions and be empathetic
Responsible decision-making: take time to do things you love and set boundaries with children
Relationship skills: ask other adults for support and share this practice with children
On Wednesday, March 30th at 3 PM GMT+3, we will host HEI Schools co-founder and professor Lasse Lipponen from the University of Helsinki for a discussion. Register to join us live and learn about topics like:
The pedagogical ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ when talking about difficult things with children
How to look at challenging situations from the child’s perspective
Ways to help children cope in times of emergency or stress
This group activity is best suited for children ages 3 to 4 years old and can be adapted for individual children (see notes).
Materials
Drawings or photos of emotions (see preparations)
Timer (optional)
Preparations
Before conducting the activity, ask children to draw faces of people expressing different emotions or ask them to act out the emotions, take photos and print them out. You can also write out the name of the emotion on each picture/photo.
Form small groups of children and ask them to form a circle. Put the emotion pictures face-down in the middle of the circle.
Encourage one child at a time to take an emotion card without showing it to anyone else.
Ask them to act out the emotion in the card while the other children try to guess what the emotion is. If someone guesses the right emotion, that child gets the card. You can use a timer if you wish to limit the time that the children have to guess the emotion.
Go around the circle so that every child has an opportunity to act a few times.
Note
Support children in dealing with disappointment if they are not the one to guess the emotion.
If you are a parent with one child, you can adapt this game by playing with each other.
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