Practical Strategies for Teaching Social Emotional Skills

This 28-minute video highlights strategies and approaches that early childhood personnel and families can use to systematically target social emotional supports that build young children’s skills in a variety of areas including making friends, problem solving, asking an adult for help, talking about feelings, and managing their emotions. The strategies rely on a 3-stage approach to supporting young children’s social emotional development by (1) introducing and practicing a skill, (2) building fluency and competency with a skill, and (3) ensuring there is maintenance of a skill. The video provides multiple examples of early childhood personnel demonstrating how to introduce a skill using a variety of tools, practice a skill through planned and unscripted activities, and maintain the skill by recognizing children for using the skill on their own.