Life's Little Lessons A PBS KIDS Learning Kit with Daniel Tiger

Preschoolers are learning to make sense of their world by organizing or sorting things into categories. It's healthy and natural to notice similarities and differences. In fact, those are some of the skills we want children to demonstrate to tell us that they are ready for "big" school.

Children will naturally categorize people too. They may tend to befriend children who are like them, and may feel uncomfortable when around children who look different from them. Attitudes about differences between people begin to develop during the preschool years. If early experiences about inclusion are positive ones, those attitudes will likely carry over into adulthood.

As early childhood teachers, we are in an important position to help young children understand that people are alike in some ways and different in other ways. We want to do our best to show them and teach them that we need to respect and be neighborly to everyone.

In this set of resources, we will use video from DANIEL TIGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD to focus on how you can help children value and appreciate ways in which we are alike and ways in which we are different.