In my diploma thesis, I explored children's emotional development when attending nursery school. The thesis is put in the teacher's perspective because I believe it is important that the person, from whom the child learns emotional responses, can recognize, understand and respond to the child's emotions. Preschooled-age is crucial for emotional development because deficits in this area can cause different troubles and problems in other areas of a person's life in the future. Infants and toddlers are already able to show and communicate basic emotions. Recognizing, understanding and regulating them is only strengthened as speech develops. Given the critical importance of this period in the emotional development of a person’s awareness, expression and regulation of emotions, I wonder whether kindergarten teachers are aware of its importance and how much emphasis they place on it.
In the theoretical part, I defined emotions and their domains as well as described basic emotions, their development stages, and how they can be encouraged. I touched upon the importance of the kindergarten itself and teachers’ role in the development of emotions and what is important, when working with children, to encourage their emotions. I also wrote about communication strategies that help to strengthen development, while highlighting four of them: active listening, summarizing, paraphrasing and door openers.
Through the qualitative research in the empirical part, I sought to explore and answer the questions asked above in the first paragraph. The answers were collected through five semi-structured interviews, which were used to summarize the teachers' views on the importance of talking about emotions, what helps them to understand children's reactions and how they react and encourage children to express and recognize emotions, and which communication strategies they use.
The answers that I gathered show, that all five interviewees agree on the importance of emotional development in kindergarten and that they, despite the lack of time, try to encourage it with the additional activities. Teachers also don't have major problems with recognizing a child's emotions. Problems were pointed out just in particular aggressive emotional reactions when the child’s response wasn't the most understandable. In most cases, that was caused by the anger that the child did not know how to express in a socially acceptable way. Teachers resolved the situation by talking to the child. All five teachers use active listening, out of four communication strategies, most often in their work. Active listening has also been the most frequently linked in the literature to the field of emotions.
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