The California Department of Education (CDE), Early Education and Support Division (EESD), provides a guiding framework for early childhood care and education through the development and dissemination of resources and development activities.

The preschool learning foundations describe research-based competencies, or knowledge and skills, that can be expected for most children to exhibit at around 48 and 60 months of age when participating in a quality preschool program.

The foundations apply to all preschool children, including children whose home language is not English and children with disabilities. One of these competencies includes the Social-Emotional Developmental Domain.

Social-emotional development includes the child’s experience, expression, and management of emotions and the ability to establish positive and rewarding relationships with others. It encompasses both intra- and interpersonal processes.

The core features of emotional development include the ability to identify and understand one’s own feelings, to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others, to manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner, to regulate one’s own behavior, to develop empathy for others, and to establish and maintain relationships.

To foster these skills in your little ones, we participated in a host of different activities during our week of feelings and literature. For this particular project, we used painted rocks to create a variety of different facial expressions.