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Learning about children's emotions
 U of I Extension family life educator Angela Reinhart finds it's a challenge to teach something useful to both experienced and new child care providers at the same time.
She found a perfect vehicle with the Parenting Counts workshops she conducted with Molly Delaney of WILL's Young Learners Initiative. They used materials from an innovative national project called Parenting Counts that showed how children think, feel and learn. Angela and Molly encouraged child care providers to think about ways they could pass on what they learned to parents.
"The whole idea of children's emotions isn't something that a lot of our child care providers have studied," said Angela. "In the workshops, they learned now to recognize their own emotions and get parents to talk to kids about their emotions, model what to do and how to name feelings." In one exercise workshop participants viewed pictures of young children and tried to name the feelings being experienced by the child. "The providers loved it," said Angela. "The exercise showed that it really is hard sometimes to read children's cues."
Extension has also helped underwrite Parenting Counts television spots on WILL-TV to bring messages about good parenting practices to moms and dads. "Having our tag line on the spots created more awareness that extension does research-based programming for parents of young children," Angela said.
For more YLI stories, click one of these links.
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