Social emotional learning is an essential element of human development and education. Social emotional learning is a crucial aspect of a child’s personal and academic development. It can take place formally or informally.
Social emotional learning can occur:
• at any age
• at home
• in childcare or early learning centres
• at school
• when children take part in groups, clubs or activities
• out in the community.
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), social emotional learning can help everyone thrive personally and academically, develop and maintain positive relationships, become lifelong learners, and contribute to a more caring, just world.
What is social emotional learning?
Social emotional learning is teaching and learning focused on the development of important life skills:
• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Social awareness
• Relationship skills
• Responsible decision-making.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is your ability to recognise:
• how you feel and think
• your strengths and weaknesses.
If you are self-aware, you can identify opportunities to:
• demonstrate gratitude and optimism
• deepen mindfulness
• promote wellbeing.
Self-management
Self-management is your ability to regulate your:
• emotions
• thoughts
• behaviours.
When you self-manage you have the ability, in a variety of situations, to:
• manage stress
• control impulses
• set and reach goals
• understand when and how to ask for help.
Social awareness
Social awareness is your ability to identify and respect the perspectives and points of view of others, including people from diverse cultures or backgrounds, who belong to different social groups or classes or who hold different religious beliefs. Social awareness can help you to express empathy, compassion and your understanding of your local community and the global community.
Relationship skills
Relationship skills give you the ability to build positive relationships with different kinds of people. They include skills like:
• clear communication
• active listening
• working together and cooperating
• resisting peer pressure
• addressing and working through conflict
• confidently managing your attachments to others.
Responsible decision-making
Responsible decision-making is your capacity to make mindful choices by assessing the potential consequences of your decisions. It also means showing respect and making decisions that support the health, wellbeing and safety of yourself and others.
What is an emotionally intelligent child?
An emotionally intelligent child:
• can recognise and label their own feelings and emotions
• has a broad vocabulary of emotional language
• can monitor changes in their own emotional state and identify the triggers
• can recognise and label the feelings and emotions of others
• can empathise with others
• has valuable social skills and can build strong relationships.
Mooshuns are a fantastic tool for supporting a child’s:
• social emotional learning
• development of emotional intelligence.
Mooshuns are feelings – feelings you can:
• see
• touch
• hold
• feel.
Mooshuns provide an opportunity for children to use emotional language, building their vocabulary and giving them a bank of feelings words to draw from so they can describe their feelings, moods and emotions.
Mooshuns are tactile and give children an object that can describe their emotions when words are not available. Mooshun moods are open to interpretation and can stimulate important discussions regarding the feeling each Mooshun suggests and why it might be feeling that way. Providing children with a variety of Mooshuns gives them wider choices, allowing them to describe their emotions more accurately.
Mooshuns can help children build communication about their feelings, moods and emotions into their everyday life. Knowing they have a safe environment in which they can share any of their thoughts and feelings is important. A child is more likely to open a discussion about their feelings when it is a normal part of their life, a practice that can help the child maintain good mental health as they grow and develop.
Vocabulary
Happiness, sadness and anger are probably the easiest emotional states for many children to identify. Having and using a broader vocabulary of words related to their feelings, moods and emotions allows children to identify and label a much broader range of emotions and recognise the different degrees of intensity emotions can have.
Boys
Our masculine culture often dictates that boys don’t show emotion or that the only acceptable emotions for boys to show are happiness and anger. Many boys react with anger to disguise the actual emotion they are feeling. Emotionally intelligent boys can label different emotions and feel comfortable expressing their emotions with different people in different ways.
Girls
Girls generally feel quite comfortable discussing their feelings with trusted friends or family. They need to develop their emotional intelligence to manage peer and social relationships, which can at times be very fragile or volatile. Emotionally intelligent girls can empathise with others and can recognise when their behaviour is having an impact on somebody else’s feelings.
Special needs
Children with special needs often have communication difficulties and are very limited in their ability to express themselves. They face serious challenges in communicating their needs. Finding a simple way for these children to share their feelings or indicate their emotional state can be a very positive step. Children from non-English speaking backgrounds can also face challenges expressing themselves with a limited English language vocabulary.
Empathy
Empathy is a very important social skill for children to develop as it allows them to place themselves in the position of another (walk in their shoes) and identify the emotion somebody else may be feeling. When they can match somebody else’s feelings to their own experience, they can learn how to manage the highs and lows and the ups and downs of friendships and social relationships. They also learn how to recognise when their behaviour has impacted on the feelings of another and how to react accordingly.
Comprehension
Recognising the emotions present in the stories children read, hear or see can help build their comprehension skills by identifying the feelings and emotions of the characters and following the story’s emotional arc. When they can identify a character’s feelings and match them to their own real-life experiences, or even connect them to events in other stories, they can make inferences and develop a better understanding of the texts they read. It can also boost their awareness of story elements and the tools writers and authors use to manipulate emotion.