empathy
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Building and celebrating friendships
The major focus of preschool is all things social emotional. Learning how to build friendships, express empathy, and take another’s perspective are lessons that take time and practice. While many of these lessons are organic – happening throughout the day as a natural part of your routines – they can also be planned intentionally. When you’re trying to encourage friendships, it helpful to spend time making sure that children know each other really well. When a child can say “I have a brother, just like you” or “My favorite food is pizza too!” They start to form bonds over these similarities. Here are some fun ideas for helping children get…
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Preschool Activities that meet Social Emotional Activities
It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for some activities aligned to a specific standard. This is the eighth week of this feature, and can you believe it, this is the last of the Social Emotional Standards. We’ve made it all the way through an entire domain. But, if you need more ideas, don’t worry, I’m always adding to my Social Emotional Pinboard! (The Standards that I use every day, and am most comfortable with are Ohio’s Early Learning Development Standards – you can review them here, however I’ve found that even if your State’s standards differ, many of these activities can still be aligned similarly). Domain: Social Emotional DevelopmentStrand: RelationshipsTopic: EmpathyEmpathy.…
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Crumpled Hearts
On Monday I posted that I have been having a lot of issues with empathy and children who are generally unkind in the classroom. One of the ideas that I had found was an activity where children crumbled paper to see how their words and actions affected others. This was an idea that I was really excited about trying with my class, so I wanted to share how it went. I wanted to make the meaning of this activity as obvious as possible, so I started by cutting each piece of paper into a heart. Then I wrote each child’s name on one of the hearts. During circle time I…
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Taking a step back
I can tell that my students have been spending too much time together (since I teach in a child care center my students can potentially be together from 7am until 6pm 5 days a week, and I am with them from 9am until 6pm every day) because of the ways that they have been treating each other lately. Little ones can be downright mean, and it breaks my heart the way that they talk to each other. I know that some self-centeredness is developmentally appropriate, that doesn’t mean that it is acceptable in my classroom. I do my best to encourage kindness and caring, but I too find myself responding…
