Social-Emotional Activities for Toddlers

Do you want to raise confident, caring, and resilient children? That starts with not reading and mathematics but teaching children social emotional awareness. Social Emotional Awareness means:

• Learning about me
• Learning about others
• Learning about coexisting on this planet

Research shows that about 80% of the job success is social emotional awareness. It is our ability to learn our emotions and manage them in a positive way helps us understand and relate to others’ emotions. Our daily interaction with the world is based on our social emotional awareness.

For toddlers this is a new feeling and something they struggle to understand. They feel it in their bodies but do not know what it means and how to deal with those big emotions. When toddler is going through this big emotional wave, it is best to ride it out instead of redirecting or interrupting that behavior. However, adding some social emotional learning activities can help your child understand their own emotions. It will give your child appropriate vocabulary to express what they are feeling.

This week on our shelf, we’ve added some fun social emotional learning activities. Here is a small glimpse of how we are supporting our son’s social emotional awareness.

This calming bottle is a part of our self-calming/peace corner. It helps children to slow down and observe the movement of confetti

Being able to identify each face with the emotions is a big step for toddler. This subtle differences in faces with emotions helps the children to understand more about feelings. The wooden emotions discs and matching cards are included in our Monti-Story Box.

Give the emotions some colors so child can understand this abstract concept. Let your child drop a pom-pom in a cup based on their feelings.

This coloring activity is a part of our Monti-Story Box but it is a great self-calming strategy

This is a great way to let your child choose how they are feeling. This is also an activity included in our Monti-Story Box

Playdough is the best sensory and calming activity for toddlers. I often make a simple salt dough at home and provide some cookie cutters in a tray. This work sits on our shelf.

Our recent Monti-Story Box includes most of these activities for your toddlers and preschoolers.