Health and Wellbeing Resources for Early Childhood Educators
Foster holistic social and emotional development in children by teaching them to understand and express emotions. Our range of emotional awareness teaching resources includes fun games and activities to make social and emotional learning a memorable and enjoyable experience.
Additionally, enhance your knowledge of effective strategies for supporting children with challenging behaviors. As an educator, it is important to identify the root causes of challenging behaviour and use it to inform the behaviour support you provide.
Essential Resources has a range of titles designed to support educators and children with their wellbeing. From emotional awareness teaching resources to mental health for educators, we're confident you’ll find reassuring, evidence-based support strategies to implement in your setting.
How can early childhood educators look after their wellbeing?
In order to provide quality educational experiences for children, it is important that as early childhood educators, we take care of our own health and wellbeing. Often as educators, we prioritise social and emotional learning for children in our care, forgetting that educator wellbeing is paramount. Anne Vize’s Taking Care of You contains evidence-based strategies for reducing stress and burnout among teachers and educators.
In the book, Anne explains how learning about mental health, making connections with local mental health support services and robust workplace bullying policies can support educators. Furthermore, implementing working arrangements that accommodate unexpected events can also enhance educator wellbeing by minimising stress.
Additionally, she explores the idea of building teacher resilience. Self-efficacy, administrative assistance and encouragement are all key strategies that contribute to building this skill.
What are challenging behaviours in early childhood?
Challenging behaviours in early childhood are actions that can disrupt the learning environment, social interactions, or the well-being of the child and others. Behaviours regarded as challenging may include aggression, noncompliance, inappropriate language or gestures, impulsiveness or self injury to name but a few. These behaviours often reflect unmet needs, developmental stages, or reactions to stress, but they can be difficult to manage in group settings like classrooms or childcare environments.
In her bestselling book But I Want To Be Good, Niki Buchan emphasises the importance of investigating the cause of challenging behaviour in order to provide effective, personalised behaviour support. She explains how neurodiversity and trauma can cause children to display behaviours regarded as challenging.
For information on creating an inclusive learning environment, dip into the A to Z of Specialist and Inclusive Education and Partnerships with Families of Children with Additional Needs.
What are some activities to promote social and emotional development in early childhood?
Promoting social and emotional development in early childhood is crucial for helping children build relationships, regulate emotions, and develop empathy. By labelling their emotions and describing how they feel, children can be encouraged to develop their self-awareness.
The authors of Prime Time Personal, Social and Emotional Development suggest using an empathy doll as a resource to encourage children to consider others. Giving the doll a persona and details such as friends, family, likes and dislikes helps to bring them to life.
They also recommend telling stories that contain a relevant problem, then providing a solution within the story. This equips children with problem solving social and emotional skills that they can use in their own lives.
Exploring Emotions also has a variety of fun activities that help children talk about a broad range of feelings including lonely; afraid, happy, angry; proud; and more.