| Social and emotional development impacts all learning domains and is the foundation for promoting and developing healthy and resilient individuals who are better prepared to learn in a school environment. Children with developmental delays display difficulties developing social and emotional skills due to their disabilities, which affects their academic success. Presently, there are limited curriculums addressing the development of the social and emotional skills of toddlers with disabilities. There is evidence that music curriculums can improve the social and emotional needs of children, and there are studies demonstrating the effectiveness of social emotional programs for typical elementary and preschool children. A music-based social emotional program, the Circle of Education, was adapted to address the specific needs of toddlers with developmental delays in order to improve language, cognition, and social emotional skills. Following its implementation, student outcomes display improvement in cognitive, language, and social emotional areas of development, based on the Hawaii Early Learning Curriculum Based Assessment and teacher's observations. |
