Where Play Meets Potential
What exactly is social and emotional learning (SEL) for toddlers?
You may understand that these are important skills for your child to learn, but what exactly do they need to learn and how? What is developmentally appropriate for a toddler?
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) or www.casel.org is a great resource to start learning about SEL.
Toddlers are just beginning to learn about themselves and see themselves as independent from their parents. For this reason, a great place to start with social emotional learning is to identify emotions and the bodily response of emotions.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) or www.casel.org is a great resource to start learning about SEL.
The Center on Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning is also a great resource.
How we feel and what our body does when we feel different emotions is the bodily response of emotions.
The feeling in our body when we feel angry can be described as
Our body can respond to feeling angry:
This would be the bodily response for anger alone and there is a whole set of emotions we can feel and all the responses can differ. Each person can feel various emotions slightly differently too.
Recognizing emotions in themselves and others will be your toddler’s first step to empathy, emotional regulation, developing relationships, communication, and conflict resolution skills.
There are numerous benefits to social emotional learning. As a former preschool and kindergarten teacher, I truly believe social emotional skills for toddlers are much more important than academic skills. Learning social emotional skills early can be very beneficial for academic and life success.
Here are some benefits in a nutshell:
If you still don’t trust me, see the resources in the section “Where do we Start with Toddlers?” for lots of research and information on the benefits of social emotional learning for toddlers.
You are probably here because you do believe in social emotional learning, so YAY, let’s get to the good stuff. Here are some amazing ideas to help support social emotional learning for toddlers (best for ages 18 months to 5 years old). As always, trust your mama gut and do only what you feel comfortable with and meets the needs of YOUR child.
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Emotion cards with real life children are the best for matching and identifying emotions. It allows the child to more easily make a connection. Viewing emotions on a real person allows the child to see the many nuances between emotions that a cartoon or emoji may not show.
The FREE emotion cards on our resource page come with realistic images and are intentionally left unlabeled. This allows for open-ended discussions involving the images you see. This resource also comes with some ideas for introduction and some separate emotion labels. Unlock this freebie and all our other resources by signing up HERE.
Once you have your emotion cards you can match in multiple ways. Match picture to picture by using emotion books. Here are a few I recommend:
You can also create DIY emotion discs or peg dolls by drawing the different emotions on these materials.
If your toddler loves sensory play, this idea is a perfect way to integrate social emotional learning.
First, tape down emotion cards to the bottom of a bin. Next, cover the cards with a sensory base of your choice. Some ideas are:
After the emotion cards are covered, add a paintbrush and some DIY emotion discs. Invite your toddler to brush away the sensory material to find the pictures. Finally, match the emotion disc to the picture.
This idea is the best because it does not require any materials or prep. You can do this anywhere, so it’s a great waiting activity.
Simply ask your child to show you a happy/angry/silly/surprised/etc. face. You can also point out what they did to make that face. “Your eyebrows went down and your lips pushed together, that shows me you’re angry.”
You can also make a face and have them guess how you feel. For older or more advanced children, you can ask how they knew how you felt.
Reading books about one Emotion & Discuss Healthy ways to manage that emotion. We collected the books we had on anger and checked some out at the library. Then I took out all the emotion cards that showed anger.
While reading the books and looking at the cards, ask some open-ended questions to spark curiosity. You could even model some techniques with no words at all (rx: character takes a deep breath and you take a deep breath).
Here are some questions to get you started:
Art is used for self expression so it’s a great way to incorporate social emotional learning for toddlers.
Simply provide a prompt and some art supplies, observe, then discuss.
“You used lots of red to show anger and pushed really hard, can you tell me more about that?”
“You made an angry face while you were creating, how did it make you feel to make that picture?”
“You used lots of straight, zig zags to show anger, what would happiness look like?”
Toddlers love stamps and stickers. They are a fun way to start a discussion around emotions. Social emotional learning for toddlers is A LOT of practice with identifying emotions. So, stamps and stickers provide that chance again.
You can ask questions about what they notice about the stamps faces or if they choose lots of the same emotion, you can ask why. They may or may not respond, but asking the questions gets their brain thinking in that way.
Social stories are simple, individualized stories that illustrate the process of a situation, skill, or concept. They were originally created to support individuals with Autism to navigate the nuances of social situations, but have become more widely used both in classrooms and in the home. You can read much more detail about social stories at carolgraysocialstories.com.
Social stories are a crucial piece of social emotional learning for toddlers. They need to see others or themselves successfully navigate foreign or worrisome situations, skills, or concepts before they can feel confident on their own.
I made a social story for Ruby when she was having a difficult time at bedtime. She was two years old and was crying at bedtime until we would come in and it took her about an hour to fall asleep. This was unusual for her, so I hoped the book would help.
To make the book, I took pictures of her during our bedtime routine. Then I wrote the story in a simple and matter of fact way, detailing each step of the process and what to expect.
Then I designed the pages in Canva and printed them to the size of a 5” x 5” board book. I attached the pages with contact paper to make them durable.
Ruby loved reading her bedtime book. We read it on repeat for several days in a row. It stays in her room and every now and again she wants to read it again.
The next social story I want to create is one for wearing masks. I was hoping all of the mask wearing would go away before she was mandated to wear one, but it looks like that is something we need to practice. I found a great one that I want to personalize a bit more HERE.
Social emotional learning for toddlers is complex. It is not as easy as a few activities to master one skill. We continue to grow and learn about ourselves and our emotions even into adulthood.
The goal is to touch the surface of self-discovery and to lay a solid foundation for emotional well being and the development of healthy relationships.
I hope these ideas have inspired you. Let me know what you will try next in the comments below.
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