I’ve been a teacher for fifteen years and have really noticed an uptick in lessons and books about social-emotional learning (often called SEL) in the past five years.

Committee for Children, a global nonprofit dedicated to social-emotional education, defines it as “ the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success.” The understanding that these skills need to be explicitly taught and continuously modeled is relatively new to public education. As a teacher, librarian, and parent to neurodiverse children, I come across the term endlessly. Here are some books about feelings to check out.Social-Emotional Learning is a huge buzzword in education and parenting.

Coping techniques can be discussed, and they can be a great conversation starter about our emotions.

Doing so can help give them the building blocks they need for emotional regulation, coping in the face of adversity, and building relationships with others.īooks can be a great way to help show children facial cues about emotions or illustrating what an emotion consists of or what it can look like. They can be overwhelming at times (come on, how many of us as adults have been overwhelmed with an emotion, too?) and helping your child identify feelings and manage them is part of healthy, well-rounded development and maturation. Kids don’t know what a feeling is until they are given a name for it. Sometimes, even as adults, we have a hard time pinpointing exactly what we are feeling or why we might be feeling a certain way. These don’t always come naturally, though. Recognizing what someone else is feeling is also an important part of development. We all have them, and if you’ve ever been around kids, you know they can have BIG feelings - and that’s great! Feeling our feelings is healthy, and what is also healthy is identifying those feelings, acknowledging them, and if need be, sitting with them or working through them.

Should be fun! But there's a storm, with loud thunder and bursts of lightning. Abbi and Van are having a sleepover at Grammy and Pop's.

Big feelings penfold