The use of group projects in a curriculum can be very useful, especially in bringing difficult concepts to the preschool level. To bring these concepts to fruition, all participants must, in a sense, become learners along with the children.

The teacher has to be careful to not act as a mentor but as a guide; that is, the teacher cannot think solely in terms of a prearranged destination to activity but must focus on offering a sense of discipline to the activity. Feelings and emotions consist of many complex components, and because of this, we must be creative in teaching our little ones about them! For this activity, we separated a variety of magazine clippings into four categories: happy, sad, angry, and surprised. Your little ones worked together to best determine whether the expression on the clipping was one of these emotions.

Brain research indicates that emotion and cognition are profoundly interrelated processes. Specifically, recent cognitive neuroscience findings suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation may be the same as those underlying cognitive processes.

Emotion and cognition work together, jointly informing the child’s impressions of situations and influencing behavior. Most learning in the early years occurs in the context of emotional supports.

Together, emotion and cognition contribute to attentional processes, decision making, and learning. Emotions and social behaviors affect the young child’s ability to persist in goal-oriented activity, to seek help when it is needed, and to participate in and benefit from relationships.

To help your little one gain an understanding of the various facial expressions that we may all, at one time, exhibit, we created a variety of different ones with play dough. Using a blank face as their template, your little one constructed different emotional states with their friends!

How do children start to understand who they are, what they are feeling, what they expect to receive from others?

These concepts are at the heart of their social-emotional wellness.

They contribute to a child’s self-confidence and empathy, her ability to develop meaningful and lasting friendships and partnerships, and her sense of importance and value to those around her.

Children’s social-emotional development influences all other areas of development: Cognitive, motor, and language development are all greatly affected by how a child feels about herself and how she is able to express ideas and emotions.

One component of this concept lies in the ability to detect emotions in others.

To do this, we went fishing for our feelings!

Each student was encouraged to select a picture of a person with a particular expression, imitate it, and then name something that made them feel similar.

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.