Young children are still developing the ability to manage strong feelings and the behaviors that often come with them. You can help them learn these important skills.
- Anticipating difficult times when children are prone to meltdowns or tantrums and providing extra support during these times.
- Labeling feelings to help children learn to identify and understand their feelings. This will help them use their words, rather than behaviors, to express what they are feeling.
- Providing comfort and reassurance when appropriate.
- Teaching children ways to calm down (such as deep breathing).
How to Calm Young Children Down in Minutes (3:33 minutes)– A classroom teacher offers a strategy to help her students calm down when they are upset
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Additional Resources
Download the handout below to share with families and identify possible strategies to address challenging behaviors at home.
Lesson Objective: To learn and practice strategies to help children identify, understand, and manage their emotions. Skills include identifying and labeling emotions, providing comfort, and modeling and cueing children to use calming strategies.
Just Breath (3 minutes 41 seconds)
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This 2-hour course will introduce you to the general characteristics of children with a visual impairment, and describe how you can include children with a visual impairment in your early care and education setting.
As introduced in Lesson 2, in the HELP® Strands protocol, the HELP® skills remain the same. However, the traditional six broad domains of the HELP® Checklist have been further grouped into concepts called Strands.
Each Strand includes HELP® skills that focus upon a specific underlying key concept, so that one skill builds the foundation for the next skill.
In addition, some (but not all) domains have “sub-domains” and some (but not all) strands have “sub-strands.” See examples below to help clarify, and follow along in your Strands protocol.
First Example: Fine Motor Domain 4.0, Sub-Domains I and II, and Sub-Strands
For an example of how skills are grouped by concept, turn to the Fine Motor domain in your Strands booklet, on pages 18 to 21.
Notice the domain of Fine Motor, 4.0, and sub-domain 4.I Foundations beginning on page 18, and sub-domain 4.II Perceptual-Motor Integration, beginning on page 20. Within sub-domain 4.II, there is Strand 4-6: Spatial Perception and Planning on page 20. Under Strand 4-6, there are 4 sub-strands: 4-6A includes Pre-Writing; sub-strand 4-6B includes Block Construction; sub-strand 4-6C includes Formboard, and 4-6D is Paper Activities. Within each sub-strand, you can be sure that one skill is related to and leads to the next. This allows for easier crediting of related skills and indicates next skills for the child to learn for that concept.
Since skills were regrouped into strands, skill numbers are not always sequential and may have age and number gaps.
Another Example: Cognitive Domain 1.0, 2 of 7 Sub-Strands
This is an important graphic for understanding the organization of the Strands. Find these 2 Strands in your protocol on pages 4 and 5. If you look at Cognitive Domain 1.0 > Strand 1-1: Development of symbolic play, you will see that for Strand 1-1 at the top of the page, skills 1.13, 1.15, 4.39, and 1.35 are the first four skills in the Strand. They are arranged in hierarchical order within the strand, starting at 2 and a half months of age and extending to 6 – 9 months. These skills all relate to the concept of this Strand, but are not in numerical order since they originated in the Checklist, which is arranged numerically.
