As social beings, humans choose to live and work together to achieve goals and provide mutual protection. Human social development begins at birth and parent and sibling interaction encourages its progress. The National Association for Early Education Research suggests social development activities essential to future success include understanding one's feelings and the feelings of others, managing strong emotions constructively and being able to build and sustain relationships.
Puppets
Young children naturally use physical activities such as pushing, grabbing and hitting to try to get what they want. Part of social development involves learning to substitute words for antisocial physical behavior. One way to teach children about the feelings of others involves puppet shows such as "Punch" and "Judy" that often show unsuccessful aggressive behaviors.
Although puppet shows provide entertainment, the enhancement to social skills comes from discussion about the puppet's behavior. Encourage the children to identify favorite puppets and ones they did not like. Use open-ended questions about why they selected certain puppets as good people or bad people. Have the children summarize what happened and speculate on what might happen next. Ask the children how puppets could behave differently and praise comments that suggest using words to describe wants and feelings rather than violence.
Read-aloud Stories
Children's books and stories can offer lessons on social behavior and provide examples for applying social skills to make others feel better or to help understand their own feelings. Read-aloud stories often explain why someone acts in a certain way in social situations, which creates an opportunity to improve empathy and understanding. Engaging children in question and answer groups about read-aloud stories improves listening skills critical to social development.
Scrapbook
Working together in harmony on a project requires many important social skills including cooperation, taking turns, listening to others and expressing your preferences. Creating a scrapbook provides activities that develop many of these social skills. Begin with a collection of pictures of class activities taken by students, their parents or teachers. Ask the children to select a set of pictures they want to put into the scrapbook. Divide the class into small groups of two or three students and ask each group to create a scrapbook page using three of the pictures and glue to place materials like paper flowers, ribbons, trim, glitter and colored stones onto the pages.
References
- National Association of School Psychologists: Social Skills - Promoting Positive Behavior, Academic Success, and School Safety
- National Association for Early Education Research: Promoting Children's Social and Emotional Development through Preschool Education
- LD OnLine: Using Children's Literature to Teach Social Skills
- Science Direct: Effects of group socialization procedures on the social interactions of preschool children
- Oregon State University: Developing Social Skills
