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Social Emotional Wellbeing
Our current project at BestStart Mangorei Road is focused on Social Emotional Wellbeing.
We have been looking into social, emotional and well-being aspects of tamariki within our centre. After observing our spaces the team decided the children would benefit from a group focus that supports their developing understanding of emotions, social skills and their overall well-being.
We start a project like this by asking ourselves what are emotions? And work with the children to identify the broad range of feelings.
We then move on to how do we recognise emotions? Here we get to have a lot of fun with art and games that lets children explore how they express themselves.
We then move on to self-regulation - How do we support our emotions?
Kaiako support children and whānau through social emotional well-being plans where we have set strategies that support children to regulate their emotions.
We then focus on how we recognise emotions in others and how do we support others in their emotions? This prompts tamariki to consider others around them and supports and promotes their developing empathy.
Once we feel the children are showing evidence, they understand each concept, we then move on to well-being.
Well-being blends nicely with our emotions as we focus on what makes us happy feeds into emotional well-being, we then work through keeping ourselves and others safe, mental health and spiritual health.
We help children understand what makes them feel good such as fresh air and healthy food. We teach them about hygiene and safe spaces.
And finally, to wrap up our project we focus on the social part of our project. Throughout the whole project we touch on supporting social development by helping tamariki understand others emotions and learning to keep others safe. We want children to understand themselves and use those same skills to support others. After refreshing tamariki on these skills we work on communication and social tools such as sharing and turn taking.