Getting Ready for School

Every elementary school teacher knows (and child development experts confirm) that “school-readiness” involves more than just knowing your ABCs. Just as essential to academic success is a set of skills that enables children to recognize and manage their emotions, build positive relationships, and control their impulses and behavior sufficiently to get along in a group of children and take advantage of group instruction. These skills, collectively, are called social-emotional skills.
Studies point to a specific cluster of social-emotional skills—called self-regulation skills—as particularly important for a variety of school successes. Children who display strong self-regulation are better able to control their impulses, pay attention, work flexibly toward goals, and show an ability to plan and organize their actions. A self-regulated child, for example, will be able to wait his or her turn in line without frustration, will resist blurting out answers when other children have been asked a question, and mighteven be observed suggesting fair solutions to a playground problem.
But . . . won’t children just learn these skills when they get older? Or do we actually need to devote time specifically to developing children’s social-emotional skills? Well, actually . . . no and no.
Early childhood is the time to infuse social-emotional skills into a child’s learning, instead of waiting until school begins. Children who begin school able to interact positively with others are statistically already at a great advantage.
But, social-emotional skills don’t need their own “class time”. This kind of learning can and should be woven organically into the other experiences and content-learning children are engaging in.