Preschools are much more than places to care for your child when you're away. While your child will receive constant care and attention, they'll also learn, grow and develop in many ways. What can you expect your child to learn during her pre-k day? Well, there are a variety of possibilities here. The specific content that your child learns depends on the school and their curriculum. That said, you can expect your child to build skills across all of the developmental domains. One of the major developmental areas that your child will build skills in is the emotional domain. Take a look at how preschool can help your child to better understand and control their emotions:

Emotional Recognition

Young children feel the same emotions that adults do. You feel angry when someone steps in front of you in line. You feel sad when you lose a favorite object. And you feel happy when you get good news. So does your child. The difference between the two of you is that while you can recognize these emotions, your 3-year-old is still struggling to do so.

The early childhood educator can help your child to recognize emotions as they are experiencing them. For example, another child takes the toy your child is playing with without asking. Your child's first reaction is to scream or hit. Why? Most likely because they're angry. The teacher can step in, ask the child why she's acting out, and help her to recognize that she's experiencing anger.

Emotional Identification

Now that your child can recognize when she's feeling an emotion, it's time to name it. Young children are in the midst of developing their vocabularies. That means your child literally may not have the words to say how she's feeling. She feels the sadness, but may not know the right words to express it.

Your child's pre-k teacher can provide verbal prompts that give them the right words to express their emotions. Along with this, classroom activities can help children to learn and identify the names of emotions — even if they aren't currently experiencing the feelings. This may include looking at face pictures and naming the emotion it looks like, reading books about feelings, or making feelings-based art.

Emotional Regulation

When your child can recognize and identify the emotions that they feel, they can also start regulating them. This is often a challenging task for the young child. But the more a child practices regulating their emotions, the better they'll get at it. The preschool teacher may offer verbal cues to help your child self-regulate when an emotional situation starts getting out of control.

Even though preschools help children to build emotion-related skills, this isn't to say that only pre-k teachers can help children to self-regulate. You can certainly do this at home. But the group setting provides a social environment that may bring up more emotion-fueled situations than you would see at home. This provides children with plenty of chances to explore and experience emotions.