Ice Cream Social Emotional Skills Preschool Board Game

Social and emotional development is an important part of being a child! Social interactions can be challenging for young children and one of the best things we can do for them is to help them understand emotions and how to communicate how they are feeling. I know ice cream always puts me in a good mood, and that’s why I thought this Ice Cream Social Emotional Skills Preschool Board Game would be a fun (and delicious!) way to teach emotions to preschoolers.

This ice cream activity for preschool is an adorable and fun way to promote social development. Just pair it with some ice cream sundaes and you have the perfect game night activity and snack!

What are Social Emotional Learning Activities for Preschoolers:

Preschool early learning usually involves counting, practicing letter sounds, and lots of read aloud books. But something that is sometimes easily looked over is that preschool social emotional development activities are just as important as academic content.

By working on social emotional development for preschoolers in the home or classroom, we give little ones a safe place to learn about feelings and emotions.

Social and emotional activities for preschoolers help children learn to identify, communicate, and appropriately respond to their feelings.

When we help teach kids about emotions, we are also in turn helping ourselves! Anyone who has ever encountered an upset preschooler knows the sooner we can get them to tell us how they are feeling, the sooner we can help them.

When we are able to communicate with our children about their emotions, it can make it easier to manage challenging behavior we may experience from them.

There are a variety of ways you can work with your child on developing their social emotional skills. Dramatic play activities, reading books, and playing games like this fun ice cream theme board game are just a few of the many options!

How To Play This Ice Cream Game For Preschoolers:

Print out a copy of the free ice cream printable for preschool onto white card stock.

Laminate the board game and ice cream emotions cards. Cut the ice cream cards apart and place them face down in the box that says “draw pile”.

Give each player a marker piece to keep track of their spot on the board. You can use mini erasers, small toy figurines, or even small square colored pieces of paper for this.

Pick a player to go first. We always choose whoever has the next birthday coming up or the youngest player, but you can pick whoever you would like!

The first player should pick a card from the “draw pile”. They will move to the space that matches the emotion shown by the ice cream cone.

If the player draws an emotion sharing card (vanilla ice cream cone with a question on it) they should answer the question and move to the ice cream cone that is blank and not showing any emotion.

You can provide help to any child who may have a hard time answering the questions. You can help them remember a time they felt the emotion, or you can encourage them to tell about a time they might feel that emotion.

To end the game, we play that you must get an emotion sharing card and land exactly on the blank ice cream cone! Feel free to change up the rules if you want to end the game a different way!

Others Ways To Use This Preschool Emotions Printable:

• Practice acting out the different emotions. Being able to read how people are feeling based on their facial expressions is a good social skill to develop.
• As you are having read aloud time during the day or before bed discuss the emotions of the characters. How are they feeling? Why might they be feeling that way? How should they share how they are feeling?
• Practice some math skills as you play the game and work on counting by ones or skip counting as each player moves their pieces to the spaces.