Empower your family or students with the Building Kids Life Skills Pack. With 62 pages of interactive activities, this pack teaches conflict resolution, problem solving, and emotional regulation. Help your children manage emotions, handle sibling conflicts, and improve parent-child relationships. Don't miss out on this whole-family or whole-class approach to building essential life skills.
Three key areas of family challenges: managing emotions, sibling conflict and parent/child conflict. I brainstormed a whole of family approach to navigate and address these topics, with the idea that I would present activities to the family but the family would do the work, and take the concepts in the activity and implement the skills into their day to day life.
From observation, I have found that a lot of conflicts can be addressed when you reflect on how children are learning life skills, it’s a journey, they won’t be perfect, just like we as adults are not perfect. As adults, we can create opportunities for children to develop and build life skills that will help them as they grow. Three significant life skills that promote positive family functioning are emotional regulation, conflict resolution and problem solving.
Humans are very relational, all of these skills start being developed when the parent/carer role models and supports the child to develop these skills.
I made a pack focused on these three life skills with activities that can be used with the whole family or even in the classroom. My husband is a teacher, so I like to make resources that can be used in both settings.
Children start off the process of regulating their emotions through co-regulation, which refers to when nurturing adults establish warm and supportive relationships, facilitate self-regulation through coaching, modelling, and feedback, and create structured and supportive environments for children. A key aspect of teaching children how to regulate is regulating ourselves as adults first. This is why this resource pack supports the whole of family work. The adults reflect and discuss their emotions at the same time the children are, the adults lead the activities and role model to the children how they themselves manage emotions everyday. Both normalising emotions and coaching the children in how to manage emotions. It’s a powerful process, where the behaviours and emotions can be externalised, the person is not the problem.
Now, I’m going to dot point the series of topics explored within the pack. It may feel like a lot, you can pick out what works for you. For me, I’ll do 2-3 topics with a family in an hour.
- Discuss and write out family OR classroom values
- Brain storm names of feelings
- Draw what ‘anger’ looks like to our family?
- If we were to give ‘anger’ a name for our family, what would it be?
- When do we feel ‘anger’?
- Where do I feel anger in my body?
- What things does ‘anger’ say in our heads?
- Triggers/ Warning signs for family members
- What helps ‘anger’ get smaller?
- It’s okay to be angry. It’s not okay to be violent. This means it’s not ok to…in our home.
- It’s okay to be angry. When we feel angry we can...
- Things we can do to feel good again poster- distraction, movement, relaxation, connection
- Anger volcano poster
- How our differences can create conflict but it’s ok to be different, What is everyone’s favourite colour?
- How our differences can create conflict but it’s ok to be different, What is everyone’s favourite animal?
- How our differences can create conflict but it’s ok to be different, What is everyone’s favourite movie?
- You might know conflict as...
- Conflict dump: Write down some things you have had a conflict/fight/argument about in the rubbish bin.
- What feelings have you experienced when you have conflict or seen with others in conflict? Create a mind map by naming emotions and attaching them to the circle with a line.
- Description/definition of conflict
- Tips for dealing with conflict poster
- Tip cards to support the family to design their conflict resolution skill poster
- In our family, this is our approach to conflict resolution with eight We… cards
- The process of problem solving
- Activity pack for problem solving, to practice problem solving skills at home with tips and space to brainstorm possible solutions to make it better or solutions for the problem to go away.
You could either complete the activity on an A4 print out of the pages, or I have stuck the A4 sheet onto butchers paper to have more space for family members to draw and add their own ideas. Students could be provided with their own poster, or completed in groups or even as a whole class activity.
62 Pages
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