How a child is feeling can impact the kind of day they’ll have. Whether they’re feeling happy, anxious, nervous or excited, you can start teaching emotional intelligence using a mood tracker. Not only that, but mood tracking also keeps parents informed about what’s happening with their child throughout the day.
Effective parent communication can help improve customer retention rates and even increase enrollment as satisfied parents recommend your childcare to their friends.
Showing parents the value that your preschool brings their family is important, and mood tracking can help you do that in a variety of ways.
Benefits of Using a Mood Tracker
A person’s emotions impact more than just how they’re feeling and their behavior that day. Emotional intelligence also impacts attention spans, memory retention and learning abilities. Without emotional intelligence, children can be derailed when their emotions escalate.
Teaching children emotional intelligence is proven to:
- Increase attention spans
- Help children engage better in the classroom
- Foster positive and meaningful relationships
- Improve a child’s ability to regulate their behavior
- Increase grades
How to Increase Emotional Intelligence in Preschoolers
According to research, there are five ways to increase emotional intelligence. Here’s a look at the important lessons teachers should educate children about to prepare them for lifelong success.
- Recognize emotions in both yourself and your peers
- Understand what causes emotions
- Labeling and naming emotions as they happen
- Expressing emotions appropriately based on the setting
- Regulating emotions
To start the day in your preschool rooms, you can talk to children about how they’re feeling. This gives you the opportunity to complete their mood tracker and document their feelings. Take time throughout the day to talk about big emotions, such as anger at having to share or anxiety when parents needs to leave in the morning.
As children start to recognize their emotional responses to various situations, they can build up their emotional intelligence.
Documenting a child’s mood also helps with the transition of care back to parents at the end of the day. The parents can look at a child’s daily summary and see how they were feeling. Parents can recognize learning opportunities to discuss behavioral problems related to specific moods and continue the teacher’s lessons long after the child leaves the classroom.
Setting Up Mood Tracking in iCare
Incorporating mood tracking in iCare is very simple. Each childcare center can customize journal entries to match the needs of its teachers. You can set them up yourself, or reach out to the iCare onboarding team to set them up for you.
To add mood tracking to your journal templates, go to the journal’s categories and assessments. Add a new set of categories and assessments, including the emotions you want to track in the classroom throughout the day.
Not yet an iCare Software customer? Schedule a demo to learn more about how our software can modernize all aspects of your business from billing to parent communication.