Thank you for coming to our first curriculum breakfast where we had the chance to share with all of you our ongoing curriculum of paint and social emotional learning. We chose to begin our social emotional curriculum by talking about feelings. We frequently talk about feelings and emotions so that the children can learn to recognize them in themselves and also in others. When a peer does something unfriendly to one of the friends, we ask the child who did the action to ask the friend how they are feeling. We are teaching the children to use phrases like I don’t like that, or It makes me feel sad (angry, mad, etc). Additionally, we also have the children recognize when someone does something nice for them. We ask them to share their feelings, and they will often say that it makes them feel good or happy that a friend did a friendly thing.
One part of the social emotional curriculum that we have been making a big push on is self-management skills. The students in our class are very capable and competent children who are able to do a lot for themselves. We have begun a strong push for independence in many areas of the class. For example, taking off their own shoes by themselves. When we come back in from outside, we always ask the children to take their shoes off and say that we will help to take off the BMS shirt and their jackets. By making this simple request, we have discovered that every child can successfully take off their own shoes, and some can take off their jackets as well. Though they will sometimes ask for a teacher to do it instead, we encourage them to do it by themselves which they can all ultimately do.
Another area of self-management that we have been working on is cleaning up after snack. Each child has a placemat, water bottle, and snack as a standard part of their snack set up. Once they have finished eating, we ask each child to bring their snack containers and water bottles back to their cubby boxes and to put their placemats back in the placemat holder. Although it sometimes requires a few reminders of all of the steps, the children have become fairly adept at following through with cleaning up. Throughout the year we will continue to push the students to become more and more independent.
We ask that you support us in this process as well so that we can have a consistent message at school and at home. Encourage your children to take off their shoes, pull up their own pants after the bathroom, roll up sleeves for hand washing, and more. We know that it can sometimes be time consuming to have a two-year-old in charge of tasks, but when possible, the more that they can do these simple tasks on their own, the more independent they can learn to be and quickly.
