Solely focusing on test scores deters from providing a supportive learning environment that nurtures students’ social and emotional development (Elias & Arnold, 2006). Addressing this need, the purpose of this article is to offer resources to help schools with children’s social and emotional learning, preparing them for living with and working with others. We start by discussing three overlapping areas of concern: (a) students’ problematic behaviors that threaten individual and classroom learning; (b) students’ social skills and the need to teach behaviors that facilitate students’ interpersonal relationships and create a civil, respectful, and productive learning environment; and (c) students’ social emotional learning (SEL) to create a nurturing and supportive classroom.
After providing this foundational information, we discuss a positive and proactive approach—teaching pre-identified social skills with children’s literature (bibliotherapy). We recommend a list of carefully selected picture books that tie in with a set of identified social skills (see Table 1). Using books as the centerpiece, we propose a lesson plan format for social skills instruction (see Appendix). We close the article with Internet links to our trove of prepared resources (lesson plans, posters, video clips, and activities; see Table 2).