Create an Emotion-Rich Classroom: Helping Young Children Build Their Social Emotional Skills

This book's goal is to give you frameworks for planning and implementing a variety of strategies to support the emotional development of young children in your care. It serves as a blueprint to design and build an emotion-rich classroom. Unlike a formal curriculum, which might have a pacing guide of skills and plans for each day, this book provides flexible, adaptable strategies and activity ideas. You can intentionally plan and modify these for your classroom to support the competencies young children are developing during their preschool years. While the content is presented in an order that will allow skills to be built on top of one another, there is not a suggested timetable for how long to focus on one area or skill. Rather, observing children in their interactions and play will support you in knowing whether to teach a new skill or continue practicing and reinforcing the first. You'll probably notice that there's not a weekly lesson for "Social and Emotional Day." There's not a specific daily lesson for a social and emotional time block either, nor is there an Emotions Unit for the beginning of the school year. These omissions are intentional. Effective social and emotional instruction is woven into the fabric of every school day. It's about teaching explicit lessons, but it's also about responding when a child is upset, modeling when you are frustrated, discussing emotions in storybooks, and asking children to share examples of emotions from their own lives. Just as a print-rich environment intentionally immerses children in a wide variety of literacy experiences, an emotion-rich classroom intentionally surrounds children with a range of social and emotional instruction and supportive interactions.