The primary school years aren’t just about developing the skills marked out in the curriculum. To excel in life, these children also need to develop vital social skills including: listening to others, paying attention, recognising and controlling their behaviour, sharing, taking turns and working with their peers. When students go through primary school building their self-regulation and social-emotional skills, they’re set up for success.

With the pressures on primary teachers to raise standards in the core curriculum, these social skills are often pushed down the list of priorities, or missed altogether. Of course the teacher and teaching assistant will tell them about inappropriate behaviour but little time is dedicated to really ‘teaching’ these skills.

At ProsocialLearn, we have been working on a three year European Union project. Now in its final year, a platform is being created in order to deliver fun educational games for primary school children to learn and practice these social and emotional well-being skills, with the promise to provide “gamification of prosocial learning for increased youth inclusion and academic achievement”.

We are calling on innovative teachers, schools and stakeholders across Europe, to join the ProsocialLearn community and adopt ‘prosociality’ in daily school practice.

We want teachers to have the tools to ensure their students can play games and access educational materials related to prosociality (i.e. learning plans, hands-on activities, articles and online resources). Having these tools will also enable them to share best practice, questions, thoughts, ideas and inspiration with colleagues from all around Europe. They can propose topics for discussion and get advice on how to design activities that promote skills like friendship, feelings, cooperation, fairness, generosity and trust.

As fun educational games for children to learn and practice social and emotional well-being skills, the activities can be used during wet-play time, or spare time when other tasks have been completed early.

We feel so strongly about the importance of including this skill development in primary schools that we’ve been working with game developers to help them deliver new learning opportunities for inclusive and cooperative education. We provide the space to design, find and play digital games for teaching people skills as well as skills for friendship, feelings and cooperation.

Whether you are a teacher or developer, you can find out more about the ProsocialLearn community and our project please visit www.prosociallearn.eu

We look forward to hearing from you, and moving one step closer to helping primary children thrive and become constructive and fulfilled citizens.

Visit us on stand BFS51 at the Bett Show or follow us on Twitter @ProsocialLearn