Strategies to Promote Social Skills, Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and Language Acquisition.

 Strategies For Positive Caregiving:

1.     Demonstrate a positive attitude.

2.     Give positive touches (high fives and hugs)

3.     Respond to the children’s vocalizations.

4.     Encourage holistic development according to knowledge of  milestones areas.

5.     Model expression by  singing, story-telling and reading

Strategies For Children Who Struggle with Behaviors, Outbursts or Impulsiveness?

1.     Rule out any sensory, home or personal issues.

2.     Create routines and make expectations clear through the use of schedules, timers, forewarnings of transitions or changes to scheduling, etc.

3.     Let a child make choices and set goals to give them a sense of control.

4.     Teaching sentence stems and vocabulary words to express feelings. I don’t like when you... That makes me…

5.     Provide If/Then visuals and simple clear directions.

6.     For busy hands - Create a place for the child to place hands to decrease touching or stemming. 

7.    For constant movement- Create this student a sitting area that allows some movement. 

8. Plan to ignore certain behaviors that are demonstrated only for the purpose of attention. 

Strategies For Children Who Demonstrate Aggression:

1.     Rule out any sensory, home or personal issues. All behaviors do not warrant immediate punishment.

2.     Figure out the demands placed on the child. What causes under or over stimulation?

3.     Use/Model words that demonstrate how to self-regulate through self-talk to control impulses. “You can go first since I went first last time.”  “I’m okay, I can do this”

4.     Teach words to express thoughts and emotions. Visuals of facial expressions to associate with feeling words. They are incorporated into sentence stems. I am…. (Frustrated, mad, sad, happy).

5.     Short stern phrases, “hands are not for hitting.”

6.     Teach empathy, sharing, prosocial skills, etc.

7.     Create a “cool down” spot to de-escalate when emotions are driven high or  create “breaks times”  that the child can use to change environments.