2 - 4 Years SEL

The Learning Resources® Jumbo Pets set has been such a staple in our play over the past year. The larger size of the animals, combined with their excellent quality and durability, has meant that we have enjoyed lots of creative adventures with the dog, cat, fish, rabbit, guinea pig, and bird. In this series of blogs, we share some fun and unusual ways to use your Jumbo Pets to keep the play creative and engaging. Now we are shining the spotlight on the Jumbo Rabbit.

Activity 1 Set Up: Small World Feeding Bin

The great thing about both of the activities I’m sharing for the Jumbo Rabbit is that they take a matter of minutes to set up but lead to lots of excellent numeracy, fine motor, and creative play. For the first activity, I simply added some leftover Easter grass into a sensory bin, along with two of the Jumbo Rabbit pets, a small feeding bowl from the pet store, and some cute pretend carrots which I found at Dollar Tree.

Let’s Play!

This is such a simple invitation to play, but it blew me away that it entertained my children for so long. They had a blast pretending that the rabbits were friends who liked to play hide and seek in the grass and go on all sorts of adventures together. The real highlight was when the rabbits got hungry, and it was time for a carrot snack. The play then turned into a fun game of carrot hide and seek as well. My seven-year-old helped my four-year-old with some counting and sorting to ensure that both the rabbits had an equal number of carrots. This was wonderful to see the leadership he was taking and how well my younger one responded to learning from him.

Activity 2 Set-Up: Roll and Count Bunny Treats

For the second activity, we used two Jumbo Rabbits, two small feeding bowls, some cute little bunny erasers from Target, and our Learning Resources Dice Popper! I set up the dice and a bowl of the mini bunny erasers in the middle, and then each rabbit had their feeding bowl. I told my preschooler that the erasers were ‘bunny treats.’

Let’s Count!

This was a fun but straightforward counting game for two players. We took turns to pop the dice and say the number out loud on the die. This was great for number recognition. Then we counted that many bunny treats into our feeding bowl, ready for the Jumbo Rabbit to enjoy. We continued to take turns to pop the dice until we reached 25 treats. The first one to get that number was the winner. You can always make the number higher or lower depending on the age of your child. My four-year-old thought it was cute that she had to collect bunny treats and enjoyed some small world play after as she fed the treats to her giant rabbit. All the time, she was working her fine motor skills hard and developing early number sense.

Making number games is such a great way to help your child learn without even realizing it. The Jumbo Rabbits were perfect for this combination of imaginative play and hands-on numeracy play and learning.

Let’s face it, even though toddlers may be little, they sure have a lot of big feelings. You’ve been there, right? One minute your child is on top of the world having a kitchen dance party and smiling from ear to ear, and the next minute they’re on the floor crying because you put the wrong stuffed animal on their bed. These feelings are real, and not only are they hard for us parents to deal with, but they’re also hard for our little ones to understand.

Now, these meltdowns aren’t completely avoidable during those early years, but by beginning to teach your child about emotions early on, you can take the right steps to help them deal with all of these big feelings a little bit better.

Want to know one of the best ways you can start working on emotions with your child? Through pretend play! Play is the best way for children to learn, so it’s no surprise that it’s a great way for your child to learn to identify and deal with their big emotions.

Products from Learning Resources to Help Your Little One Identify Their Feelings:

Big Feelings Pineapple 

Just like your child, this pineapple feels a lot of feelings! The Big Feelings Pineapple comes with 26 facial pieces to create various facial expressions, making it a perfect way to work on social-emotional learning. Tips for using the Big Feelings Pineapple:

• Talk about the face you are creating while you are creating it, “My pineapple feels happy. It has a smile on its face, and its eyebrows are raised up high!”
• Discuss the different items your child chooses, “Oh, I see you have heart eyes. Your pineapple feels loving.  I feel loving when I’m with you!”
• Match the facial expressions that you place on the pineapple to the feelings chart that it comes with, or take it a step further and see if your child can identify their own feelings on the pineapple feelings chart.

Learn-a-Lot Avocados

These Learn-a-Lot Avocados are the sweetest! They come with four avocados that are the perfect size for little hands. With these avocado’s your child can develop fine motor, color matching, and social-emotional skills all at once. Each avocado has a spinning pit that features two unique emotions. Tips for using the Learn-a-Lot Avocados:

• Talk about opposite emotions, “This avocado feels sad.  I feel sad when I make a mess. This avocado feels happy. I feel happy when my mess is all cleaned up!”
• Make a face (angry, happy, sad, etc.), and see if your child can find the avocado’s expression that matches yours!
• Make it into a game! Hide the avocado halves around the room, and see if your child can find them, “can you find the avocado who’s mad?”

Looking for additional ways to support your child’s social-emotional learning?  Try these tips!

• “Name it to tame it!” This phrase was coined by author and psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Siegel, and it means exactly what it says. Label the emotions your child is feeling while they’re feeling them. By naming their feelings, your child will begin to associate the emotion’s label with the feeling they are experiencing. They will eventually start to identify and label these emotions themselves. So next time your child is crying because they ate their last fruit snack, try saying something like, “I see that you’re crying because your last fruit snack is gone. It makes me think you are feeling sad.”

• Let your child see and hear you talk about your own emotions! Talk about both the happy and sad feelings you experience. And know that it’s ok to let our children see us upset sometimes; by allowing them to see this, we are letting them know that it’s normal to experience these different feelings.

• Read books together and label the different emotions that the characters feel throughout the story. Simply start by identifying what you see within the story, “Peppa looks so happy to put her rain boots on. She is excited to jump outside in puddles!”

Social-emotional learning starts early. By applying these strategies within the play and daily activities, you can support your little one’s understanding of the big feelings they experience each and every day!

Anyone else already feeling lots of big feelings in 2021? 

We all know a young child’s brain is developing quickly in their earliest years. Part of that development includes building important foundational skills like understanding and expressing their own emotions, managing their responses to those emotions, and recognizing and developing empathy for others' feelings.

If you are like our family, you’re looking for any way to support your toddler’s social-emotional learning this year. Maybe you’re motivated because they’ll start preschool in the fall, and you want them to be resilient during challenging moments when you’re not present to support them. Perhaps you want them to be able to have the skills necessary to foster strong relationships and friendships -- something they might not have had a lot of practice with during the pandemic. Or maybe they're merely two, and you’re all just baffled by the tantrums and nuanced big emotions they are exhibiting. 

Below are some fun, engaging activities you can do with your child to help them build the language necessary to name and differentiate between their own big feelings and those of others, thus laying the groundwork for self-regulating and responding purposefully to those emotions when they arise. 

Materials we used:

• Learning Resources Big Feelings Pineapple
• Learning Resources All About Me 2-in-1 Mirrors
• Picture books about emotions/feelings (examples shared below)

We began our play by exploring and revisiting books that included descriptions of various emotions or highlighted diverse people/characters expressing various emotions in illustrations and photographs. Then, we named each facial expression we came across. Here are some titles we enjoyed:

• Making Faces: A First Book of Emotions by Abrams Appleseed (board book)
• Baby Happy, Baby Sad, and Mad, Mad, MAD by Leslie Patricelli (board books)
• In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek (picture book)
• The Feelings Books by Todd Parr (picture book)

Next, to deepen connections and demonstrate understanding, we practiced making and identifying our own angry, sad, silly, happy, nervous, and surprised faces in front of the All About Me 2-in-1 Mirrors. 

One side of each mirror shows a normal reflection, while the other is a ‘fun’ mirror that warps reflections for additional silliness. These mirrors are a wonderful resource for our youngest learners, as they are super-durable, easy to hold, and small enough to tuck in multiple play areas or pack up for play on-the-go.

Once we had built some confidence around a wide variety of basic emotions, we dove into another great social-emotional learning tool for exploring more nuanced facial expressions and related emotions: the new Big Feelings Pineapple!

This bright, two-sided pineapple toy comes with 26 different pieces for building various emotional faces ranging from silly to serious, including frustrated eyebrows, excited grins, and anxious eyes. A small poster included in the set illustrates various feeling prompts, including some opposite emotions like calm vs. anxious and happy vs. sad. (Bonus: Fine motor skills are acutely honed when lining up and placing each piece inside the pineapple’s holes!)

In addition to letting your child build their own imaginative faces, consider prompting their play and learning with questions like:

• What emotion is this pineapple feeling? How do you know?
• This pineapple looks nervous. What does your face look like when you are nervous about something?
• This pineapple looks sad or disappointed. What does/do my mouth/eyebrows look like when I make a disappointed face?
• This pineapple looks angry! What is the opposite of angry? Let’s build that face on the other side of the pineapple and compare how they look.
• This pineapple’s face is showing me that it is feeling frustrated about something. When you are feeling frustrated, what do you do/need to help you calm down? 

In addition to practicing different faces and naming different emotions, we also used the All-About-Me mirrors to observe ourselves practicing some calming ‘belly breaths.’ This mindfulness technique can help your child slow down, reduce their heart rate, and bring awareness to their body when they feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or upset. When practicing belly breathing, have your child place their hands on their stomach and take a deep breath in through their nose, imagining their belly-filling up like a balloon, and then release the breath slowly through their mouth, like they’re blowing a huge bubble. Belly breaths are a great coping skill to practice when they feel calm, so they have that tool in their tool-chest for those difficult, big-feelings moments. 

Looking to adapt or extend your social-emotional play and learning even further? 

• Provide open-ended opportunities for your child to process or express their emotions through art or movement, like drawing, painting, or dance.
• Using a clear, upcycled water bottle or a Learning Resources Primary Science Sensory Tube, create a ‘calm down jar’ your child can utilize when they need a quiet moment to sit with and work through big feelings. Many inspiration and DIY guides for creating mindfulness or calm down jars can be found online, but they often involve some kind of liquid and glitter or beads that they can quietly watch fall from side to side.
• Even younger toddlers (1.5+) utilize the equally fun and fine-motor-friendly Learning Resources Learn-A-Lot Avocados to foster recognition of opposite emotions like ‘happy’ vs. ‘sad.’ 
• For older children (5-10) ready to have more in-depth conversations about their feelings and work through emotional scenarios they might encounter, open the door to dialogue with the Learning Resources Let’s Talk Cubes. These include prompts and questions like “What makes you feel safe and secure?” and “I feel most happy when…”
• Work together with your child to create a cozy, quiet corner in your home that they feel safe retreating to when they require space to self-soothe, regain emotional or physical control. Process big feelings -- think pillows, a friendly stuffed animal/lovey, helpful books (like Belly Breathe by Leslie Kimmelman, The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld, Crankenstein by Samantha Berger, or Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall) or other calm-down tools best suited to support your child.