Cara Zelas

What are manners?

How do we have respect for ourselves and our others in the environment?

How do we have a growth mindset?

What are our feelings?

All those good social skills we want our young children to learn.

And that kind of led me down in an organic way to create Big World of Little Dude book series and the Humankind curriculum.

I think that, as I was saying, as a parent, you're the first teacher of your child.

And yes, social and emotional learning skills should begin at home.

However, parents are very overworked, overwhelmed,

It's a lot.

It's like a lot of language, a lot of techniques.

It's very overwhelming.

And I think that parents really struggle.

Some parents might really struggle.

They might just not have the skills.

or the language or the tools or maybe the way they were brought up, they didn't have access to all this information.

So, yes, I think it's really important that it begins at home, but I think it's even more important that it happens in the classroom because research shows that social emotional learning in schools leads to academic success.

So they go hand in hand.

When you have a classroom of kids who are regulated, where you feel like a strong classroom community, where you feel like you really know your peers, that's when rich learning can really happen.

And so there's a strong correlation there.