Develop Social Communication Skills For Children in Early Grades
Good Talking Words is an engaging and developmentally appropriate curriculum designed to help young children in preschool and the early grades develop effective social communication skills. It facilitates social-emotional learning (SEL) through lessons focused on progressively helping young children learn specific concepts, vocabulary, and the expected behaviors needed for successful communication and interactions with their peers and adults.
Social-emotional learning contributes to many positive aspects of academic and life success. Social-emotional learning helps us:
- Understand and manage our emotions
- Build a sense of resilience
- Establish and maintain positive relationships
- Attend to feelings
- Set and achieve positive goals
- Make decisions
Good Talking Words provides a series of 10 engaging, playful, and developmentally appropriate lessons that follow learning principles based in cognition and brain research. Lessons are delivered in an intentional sequence that cover these critical skills:
- Foundational sensory perceptual skills (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic)
- Personally responsible social communication skills
- Interaction skills
- Problem-solving skills
Resources
We know weaving SEL into your academic curriculum may seem overwhelming, but we’ve compiled a list of simple activities you can begin implementing this fall to get you started. Regardless of what grade your students are in, these activities can be adapted to help teach the core social and emotional competencies.
One simple but important way to foster student success is to establish a space that is welcoming and comforting for all. Inclusive classrooms are those in which each student can equally participate in every learning experience.
A sound wall is an interactive reading and writing instructional tool for students. It focuses on sound, instead of the letters of the alphabet, with the 44 phonemes in the English language. Sound walls are created to facilitate the connection from speech to print.