Your guide to activities and fun things to do with your preschoolers, toddlers and kids in Dallas, TX

Committee for Children executive director and internationally-known expert on violence prevention, Joan Cole Duffell, joins us today as a guest writer for our Dallas Savvy site to share with parents important suggestions and tips on how to manage our children's emotions during stressful times - whether at school or home - the key is to be aware and involved.


"The holidays will soon be with us. While holidays can be fun and exciting for children, they can be disappointing and stressful. With the intense excitement and anticipation the holidays present, emotions can flare up, especially among your children!

Fortunately, there are some simple activities you can do with your children to help them understand and manage their emotions, feelings, and actions while having fun times together. Many of these activities will help young children learn important social and emotional skills, such as those students learn in Second Step: A Violence Prevention Curriculum, which is taught in hundreds of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes throughout the country.

This program, which was developed by Committee for Children, teaches children the skills of empathy, emotion management, and problem solving. In pre-school and kindergarten, children learn how to:

* Identify their feelings and become aware of the feelings of others

* Manage their emotions by identifying strong feelings and using calming down techniques, thus inhibiting impulsive behavior.

* Solve problems by learning how to identify their feelings, the problem, and the possible solutions.

They also learn friendship skills of sharing, trading, and taking turns, ignoring distractions.

While Second Step is taught in schools, pre-schools, and child care centers, we strongly believe that families play a vital role in teaching these important skills. To help families, we offer a variety of ideas for "at-home" learning that you might find fun to do with your children. These activities can help children identify and manage various feelings, solve problems, make friends, or even improve their reading skills. They include:

* Talking together - Encourage your children to tell you how they are feeling, and share your feelings with them.

* Reading together - When you are reading a storybook together, look carefully at the pictures and ask your child to figure out how the characters are feeling.

* Drawing - Asking your child to draw pictures or make faces for you of someone who is happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised, or frustrated.

* Playing games together - Playing board games with your child gives you lots of opportunities to practice managing feelings, following rules, taking turns, and having fun together.

* Hearts - Cut out paper hearts together and put them in an envelope. Give your children a paper heart when he or she uses demonstrates caring and responsible habits. To encompass reading and writing practice, you can encourage them to write down why they got the heart. Along the way, have them count how many hearts they received in a week. (Note: this activity should be non-competitive. Children will delight in seeing their "hearts" grow on a mural for all to see.

These are just a handful of ideas for you to consider. Please visit our website to learn how else you can help your child develop the self-management, relationship-building, and problem-solving skills that will enable them to make safe and healthy choices -- not just during the holidays, but all through their lives."


Joan Duffellwas recently in Dallas attending the National Association for the Education of Young Children Annual Expo and visiting Dallas preschools successfully using the Second Step program. She can be reached at jduffell@cfchildren.org.