Social-Emotional Learning at Home

earning to manage emotions and be sensitive to others helps kids succeed in school and life!   View this email in your browser   Social-Emotional Learning at Home This blog post was written by Kidaptive co-founder and Chief Learning Scientist Dylan Arena and was published earlier this week on Education.com. Social-emotional learning, or SEL, is exciting—and not only because it promises well-behaved, considerate kids!  When a child practices social-emotional learning, he is learning how to recognize and manage his emotions and navigate social relationships.  Recent research on over 270,000 students showed that those who received SEL instruction outperformed those who didn’t by an average of 11 percentile points on measures of academic achievement. In short, SEL matters, whether you care about whole-child development or pure academic achievement.  So what can we do to equip our children with the social and emotional tools they need to thrive? What You Can Do For early learners, there are three foundational aspects of SEL: understanding and expressing their own emotional states; responding to others’ emotional states; and beginning to learn to control their emotional states.  (Young children’s brains aren’t yet fully wired to allow them the kinds of emotional control that adults can muster.)  Parents can support this learning at home, every day. Build Social-Emotional Vocabulary First, help give your child words for the emotions he feels.  To a preschooler, feelings like frustration, fear, and boredom can just seem like a bunch of ways of feeling “sad.”  Understanding their differences helps pave the way for finding solutions.  When you comfort your child, describe the kind of “sad” he’s feeling.  You might say, “Whoa, you almost fell off the bed!  That must have been scary. I bet you’re crying because you’re feeling scared right now.” Click here to view the full article and learn how to support your child in identifying peers' emotions and managing their own!