Help! For Teachers of Young Children: 88 Tips to Develop Children′s Social Skills and Create Positive Teacher-Family Relationships

"A delightful book. . . . It is readable, convincing, and useful for communicating with children and engaging them in fruitful conversations. I would recommend this book to anyone who has the good fortune to be working with young children."
-Marilyn Segal, Director of Academics
Mailman Segal Institute for Early Childhood Studies
Nova Southeastern University, FL

"Even though strong parent-teacher partnerships benefit children, very little attention is usually given to training teachers to tap into this powerful resource. Kaltman′s practical tips make for a very valuable resource."
-Ruth R. Kennedy, Assistant Professor
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Help children develop critical social skills and build positive team relationships with parents!

Ensuring children′s healthy social and emotional development is one of the most important-and most challenging-responsibilities for preschool educators and parents. This reader-friendly reference offers 88 tips to tackle the task by focusing on what teachers can do with children and their parents.

Help! For Teachers of Young Children provides readers with entertaining stories and practical strategies covering a range of topics, from using discipline as a teaching tool, to helping children learn to communicate, cooperate, and develop self-esteem. The book also addresses the many facets of working effectively with parents, including parent-child separation anxiety.

Each tip offers:

• A short and engaging real-life story
• Suggestions that teachers can use immediately
• "Ask Yourself" questions for teachers to think about their classroom practice

A "Try This" section at the end of each chapter gives readers even more activity ideas. Preschool teachers are guaranteed to find fresh and fun insights each time they open this resource and its companion volume, More Help! For Teachers of Young Children: 99 Tips to Promote Intellectual Development and Creativity.    

Gwen Snyder Kaltman has spent more than 25 years working with young children, their parents, and teachers. She is the author of Help! For Teachers of Young Children: 88 Tips to Develop Children′s Social Skills and Create Positive Teacher-Family Relationships and More Help! For Teachers of Young Children: 99 Tips to Promote Intellectual Development and Creativity. She has been a preschool teacher, director, college instructor, and educational trainer in various parts of the country and has also been a validator for the National Academy of Early Childhood Programs, the accreditation division of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Kaltman has worked with young children in Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia. She has trained teachers working in Head Start programs in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and rural Georgia and in child care centers and preschools in the suburbs of New York City and Washington, DC. She has observed preschool classes in such diverse places as China, Easter Island, Greenland, India, Malta, Mongolia, Tibet, Tanzania, Venezuela, and native villages above the Arctic Circle and along the Amazon and Sepik rivers.

She earned her BS and MEd in early childhood education from the University of Maryland.