Curriculum Design for Building and Developing the Social-Emotional Skills of Preschoolers

Abstract

"The present study investigates the theoretical, methodical and practical aspects which emphasize the importance of the formation and development of social and emotional skills during early years, which have a major impact over children’s long-term growth, while also assuring their adjustment in society, the cut down of unwanted behaviours and provides social and emotional well-being for the preschooler. The steps dedicated for the pedagogical experiment have had the purpose of verifying the efficacy of the application of the project - The Development of Social and Emotional Skills Curriculum (DeCo - SE)- and was targeted towards building and growing said skills for the last year preschoolers. The results of the research revealed that the efficiency of applying a curriculum based on building and developing the social and emotional skills of preschoolers. We conclude that the study gave promising results on the prevention and reduction of undesirable behaviors, the identification of emotions, tolerance to frustration, relaxation through deep breathing techniques, methods of controlling anger and destructive behaviors among preschoolers. The comparative results presented in this study reinforce the findings of other international studies (Merrell et al., 2008), according to which the implementation of The Development of Social and Emotional Skills Curriculum (DeCo - SE) contributes to reducing undesirable behaviors, children being modeled in a positive way, having a positive social attitude, managing to easily adjust their emotions."