Play and Language: Building Social-Emotional Skills and Self-Regulation – Carol Westby, Ph.D.

Salepage link: At HERE. Archive:

Vocabulary and enunciation are the most common (and sometimes standardized) ways to decipher a child’s speech or language skills… but shouldn’t we be looking at the full story? How a child interacts with other children or in the classroom, can shed light on a child’s social-emotional development which can lead to language deficits.

Cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic and motor components are blended together by one universal activity — PLAY! And without it, developing children may encounter intellectual, social, emotional and physical harm.

Join internationally-renowned expert on play assessment and language-literacy, Carol Westby, PhD, CCC-SLP in our NEW online course, Play & Language, as she teaches you firsthand, how to effectively use her Westby Play Scale — a tool that offers a way to evaluate all young children’s (birth-5 years) symbolic play skills. Supported by 40 years of evidence-based research, she will help you discover current play theories and personal narrative skills to improve children’s language, literacy, cognition, social-emotional skills, self-regulation, self-identity and problem-solving.

Through videos and case examples you will learn interventions using playful practices and fictional stories or life stories for children with learning disabilities, autism, and socio-economic/cultural variations influencing their early language, play, and literacy development.

Walk away with advanced techniques to:

Integrate the role of play in self-regulation.

Develop playful practice approaches to emergent literacy.

Assess fictional and personal narratives, considering cultural influences.

Expand children’s ability to make inferences by relating emotions and mental states to events.

And so much more!

Increase literacy, academic success, creativity and social skills with strategies specifically developed for Play & Language in this new online course!

Play & Language:

The Roots of Literacy

Discover current play theories, the development of the four dimensions of play in young children (birth-5 years), and how play can improve language, cognition, social-emotional skills, self-regulation and literacy. Learn current intervention strategies for children with language learning disabilities, autism, and socio-economic/cultural variations:

Advance phonological skills and comprehension for emergent literacy using playful practice

Encourage the interactions essential for social-emotional development

Facilitate children’s understanding of the temporal, cause-effect, and social relationships that exist in the world and that are critical for comprehension of social and academic interactions

Stimulate language for interpersonal communication and abstract reasoning

Nurture children’s ability to interpret and respond appropriately to the needs, desires, and roles of others and to use this knowledge to infer the thoughts of others

Promote children’s ability to organize and monitor their own behavior so they can become independent, self-motivated learners

Walk away with therapeutic interventions you can begin using immediately.

Narrative Intervention for Building Social-Emotional Skills and Self-Regulation in Children and Adolescents:

Going Beyond Language and Literacy

Learn the roles of autobiographical memory, personal narratives, fictional narratives and life stories in social interactions, self-regulation and academic performance. Walk away with strategies to develop children’s narrative skills to improve their social-emotional skills, self-regulation, self-identity and problem-solving:

Reminiscing to promote autobiographical memory

Vocabulary for mental state/emotion words and the syntactic patterns needed to express relationships between events and mental states/emotions

How settings influence characters and events in stories

Building narrative plots

How physical and psychological attributes of characters in stories affect their nature and behaviors

Supporting students in making narrative inferences

With these highly effective narrative strategies, you will leave confident in your ability to boost self-regulation and academic growth for the children you work with.