Dilly Days with Beth and Joellyn: Authors of The InvestiGator Club™ for Robert-Leslie Publishing

The Jonesboro Sun newspaper did a story on The InvestiGator Club!

Beth is going to be attending and presenting at the Alabama Pre-K Conference in Montgomery this week. At dinner on Wednesday night, she’ll be speaking on “This is the Bestest Day of My Life: Bringing Joy to the Preschool Classroom through Social and Emotional Development.”

Then on Thursday afternoon (3:30–4:45), she is leading the breakout session: Investigating with Science Wrapped in Literacy. You can also meet her on the exhibit floor. Please stop by and say “hi!”

The National Association for the Education of Young Children is holding their 2007 Conference and Expo in Chicago this year. Come visit Beth and Joellyn at The InvestiGator Club/Robert-Leslie Publishing booth #226! They’ll be doing book signings on November 8 and 9 at 1:00. Come by anytime to pick up your free Learning Center Poster.

Today’s something is nice and simple. Please read all the way through for your smile and affirmation.

Marion Hyson presents some good, practical techniques in her book The Emotional Development of Young Children.

1. Provide daily activities that prompt children to think about emotions. Promote pretend play. Share emotion-rich books. Weave creative arts throughout the curriculum.
2. Smile, look interested, look sad: Show your own feelings and mirror children’s own expressions of emotions. Engage babies in “imitation games.” Let children see that their own expressions influence others’ reactions.
3. Respond to what children are feeling. Tune in to children’s faces, bodies, and voices. Use this information to construct prompt, sensitive appropriate responses.
4. Name children’s feelings. Give words to what children experience emotionally. Connect the emotion labels that you use with children’s cultures.
5. Talk about the causes of feelings. Help children connect the way they feel with what made them feel that way. Use these conversations to build children’s ability to see others’ point of view.

In this post, a prekindergarten teacher talks about how she deals with strong emotions at the end of the year.

We all know that socialization is an important part of prekindergarten. But what are the actual coping skills that would result in an emotionally healthy child who is ready for kindergarten? These are some of the ones highlighted by Beth and Jo at the National Head Start Conference:

• Following rules, routines and directions
• Identifying feelings in oneself and others
• Controlling anger and impulses
• Problem Solving
• Suggesting play themes and activities to peers
• Sharing toys and other materials
• Taking turns
• Helping adults and peers
• Giving compliments
• Understanding how and when to apologize
• Expressing empathy with others’ feelings
• Recognizing that anger can interfere with problem solving
• Learning how to recognize anger in oneself and others
• Learning how to calm down
• Understanding appropriate ways to express anger

Here is a sample lesson plan about making kites for your prekindergarteners and their families.

This continues our handouts series from the National Head Start Conference’s Family Involvement workshop. Here is a sample letter to send home with the children at the start of a new unit. (pdf, 80k) The second page is the same letter in Spanish.

It took us longer to get those promised Head Start Conference Workshop handouts up than we had originally expected. Thank you for your patience. We hope these will be useful.

Here are some sample sheets to send home to help increase family involvement. (.zip, 900k) More to come.

Joellyn managed to get in a quick phone call to me today. She, Beth, and the Robert-Leslie team are still going full steam at the National Head Start Conference. It sounds like the two workshops that she and Beth led were great successes, attracting 60-80 attendees per session. Wow! She also said that we needed to make their handouts available for download. If you came here looking for those, we’ll try to get them up soon. And thanks for choosing Beth & Jo’s workshops. We hope you enjoyed them.