The ripe age of 3 is when a child learns most of their developmental skills that go a long way and help shape their lives for the real one ahead. The toddler phase of a child's life is when they start experiencing and expressing new feelings and emotions. These outbursts or hurtful emotions make them confused and not understand the next step to take. Hence, as a result of not understanding, they may shy away from social instances or use destructive methods to communicate that can form into bad habits.
Emotional development can add to several other areas of growth in children and make them more independent with the right learning methods. A toddler's play can help develop their cognitive process and better identify social-emotional situations and how to dwell in them. Therefore, teaching children about their emotions from an early age is critical and isn't difficult with the following interactive activities and playtime routines:
Best Activities for Emotional Development in Toddlers
Introduce Imaginative Play Time
Some ways that toddlers express their emotions are through imagining being someone they are not, such as pretending to be a professional or copying what adults around them do. These activities can help them portray different sets of emotions and get them developed as they keep doing so. For this, activities like puppet play with story themes like onlydinosaurs.com entice kids these days and make them engage in play.
Through dinosaur puppets and interactive storylines, kids can engage in their imaginative play and learn different emotions displayed by the characters. Moreover, activities like creating stories and games, dressing up, pretending to be grownups, and more are all imaginative play ideas for generating emotions and cognitive thinking.
Let Them Experience Mess
If everything is perfect and neat around a child, he/she may not learn important emotions and habits related to becoming independent and taking care of their clutter. Evidently, the first thoughts and reactions may be of confusion and annoyance. However, these are good opportunities to help kids manage these emotions and find ways to become more flexible. These help them deal with challenges on their own and messy areas and situations.
With all kinds of messy or interactive plays such as Only Dinosaurs puppet storytime, make them clean up and rearrange tools used in that time to feel the sensation of responsibility and learn to take control. Even if it is a little added work for you to clear up the mess and get kids cleaned up after fun time in sand or water, they are important plays that help them experience important emotional and cognitive developments as well as fine motor skills.
Help them learn About Different Emotions
If there are some specific emotions and feelings you want your child to understand that may have been confusing them, assigning them to create play scenarios with dinosaur puppets can help them become easy to understand. The kids can enact the scenes with emotions like jealousy and rage themselves later to feel them and understand and organize them.
Similarly, you can use other opportunities to let the kids take the lead and feel the emotions firsthand to recognize. By helping kids choose their own plays and the ways they want to play them, you can help them build essential communication skills and leadership abilities, and emotions. As they lead, they learn how to keep themselves and the people connected together.
Embrace Their Outbursts and Organize
They say that toddlers are tiny beings with big personalities and displays of emotions. At this time, they will have experienced or be experiencing emotions relevant to humans and displaying them big time. Some of the complicated feelings for them (and some parents) may be frustration and anger that give way to tantrums and fights in the house.
It's important to help them regulate these emotions the most and organize them into productive ones. You can help them relax by solving their problem. Instead of ignoring their feelings, help them face these hostile moods and confusion they don't know how to handle. You can allow them to cool down with a cold bath or swimming pool activities and provide them productive outlets with activities like painting or playing a sport.
Setup Singing and Dancing Opportunities
Music and dance are some of the excellent cognitive development activities for kids. They also help little individuals feel different kinds of emotions that levitate their mood and make them feel happy. Moreover, through helpful rhymes, they can not only get entertainment but learn important emotions and respond to them; some examples of such songs are "if you're happy and you know it" or "the feelings song".
Through singing and dancing sessions, kids' imagination enhances as they try different moves and pitches to sing along. It gives them control to roam around and freely move while tuning into endless imagination and emotions. Let them try altered songs and themes like the prevalent Only Dinosaurs jingles and plays that help them learn as well.
Help Them Share
Sharing is a helpful practice to be taught to children, if they haven't learned already, by the time they are transitioning from toddlers to preschoolers. This activity is important as it helps kids sense an array of emotions that make them better with people and social situations and cues.
Sharing and playing with other children exposes them to feelings of disappointment once they let go of a thing they like and emotions like satisfaction when they see others getting happy from their actions. As a result, a child learns about fairness in the world and the negotiations they should make to create balance, make friends, and keep them.
Add Emotion Inducing Books to the Shelf
Sometimes there aren't enough ways or time to help your kids engage with all the important emotions they need to get exposure to. To make up for these instances, you can include several books in your children's reading list. For this reason, you can get specific books that portray different emotions and feelings that your kid goes through at their age.
Search for books that help them cope with different kinds of confusing emotions and channel the best ways to let them out. Reading or listening to books are activities that offer significant cognitive and social development, help learn about things going on in the world, channel imaginative thinking and become curious.
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