Who loves good cookies and what are your favorite kinds? As you know, cookies are a collection of ingredients put together following a sequence of steps, resulting in tasty outcomes.

You all know about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right? Do you know what this hierarchy was originally called? It was a new learning for me while listening to the recent webinar by Drs. Jessica and John Hannigan, SEL from a Distance: Building a Framework of Processes into your School/District to Guarantee Student Success.

Children first need our guidance to build a foundation that then can be deepened with play exploration. So how about playful instruction with planful play guiding our preK implementation?

Summer is coming and it’s time for play. Keep literacy learning a part of each day! Word play is fun and easy to do. Think of the words for the things around you.

Social emotional learning is a prevalent topic in education today, with a recognition that how children feel is as important as their academic growth. However, this perspective infers there is a dichotomy of skill sets, social emotional skills and academic skills. To this point, some early childhood programs have intentionally focused on young children’s social emotional skills and discouraged including academically related skills with a sense that social emotional skills need to develop before children are able to learn other skills. Consider these skill sets as all interconnected and integrated, instead of being a dichotomy, and that social emotional learning is dependent on executive function skills, which are interrelated to cognition, which is connected to oral language. Social emotional learning develops as we effectively learn to use the background knowledge we have gained through experiences and skills acquired to help us with tasks