Life Tools for Social, Emotional (and Intellectual) Development

The longer I work at this whole teaching (and parenting) thing, the more convinced I am that it's (almost) ALL about social emotional development. I think great teachers have known this all along, and now the emerging field of neuroscience can overwhelmingly support this notion.

So this year I finally decided to do something about it. I decided I'm no longer okay with leaving SEL up to chance, fitting it in occasionally during a morning meeting, or thinking of it as something that gets in the way of the other more important stuff. As a kindergarten teacher I have firmly committed to the notion that it IS the important stuff.


But, I also know myself and know how easy it is to forget about something in the midst of a busy school day. So, I got inspired to create our own set of tools and hung picture cards of each of them on the wall of our meeting area.

The tools aren't perfect, and I already have plans to tweak some of them for next year. Some of them don't even technically qualify as social-emotional skills but rather are brain-based/intellectual skills important for "success" in life. But whatever they are, we do see them everyday. And seeing them everyday means we talk about them everyday too. And making them a part of each day rather than an occasional add-on has drastically changed the nature of social-emotional learning in our classroom.

At the beginning of the school year I purposefully introduced each of the tools one at a time, but since then we've used them as they naturally come up - in our learning, in our read-alouds, in our conversations, in our disagreements, and in our play. Prepackaged curriculums just aren't my thing, but meaningful and authentic learning in the moment certainly is. Some days that means we're talking a lot about ways to calm our emotions, some days we're repeatedly revisiting our problem solving tool, some days are all about active listening and self-control, and some days the perspective taking tool is front and center of what we do. And sometimes that all happens within a single day - or a single hour :) - because yes, they are five! And that's the beauty of the tools - they're there when you need them.

Making our tools concrete has provided us with important language for better understanding the skills we're learning along the way. And my big hope is that it provides kindergartners with concrete understandings they can carry with them wherever they go.


Stay tuned to learn more...