Life skills in the Early Childhood Education curriculum and practice

Abstract

Life skills are considered as skills for adaptation and positive behavior, which allow to achieve, individually, the effectiveness for the demands and challenges of every day during life. These are: self-awareness, empathy, interpersonal relationships, decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution; assertiveness, creative thinking, critical thinking, management of emotions and feelings, stress and tension management. These skills are distributed in three areas: social, emotional and cognitive; furthermore, contributions of these skills can be found in the way in which contents are taught, instructed and developed within Higher Education institutions, specifically to students in the process of teacher training at the Early Childhood and Kindergarten levels. This article presents the results of a mixed study, whose quantitative phase was descriptive-correlational, while the qualitative phase was phenomenological. With this design, it was possible to obtain a comprehensive analysis of life skills and their incorporation into the curricular design of the curriculum of the Early Childhood and Kindergarten Education teaching and licensure programs in El Salvador.