Helping adults prepare children for kindergarten and life.

Show #13: 5 Soft Skills That Encourage Future Professional Success

1. Social Skills

Social skills cover an array of skills – they enable us to know what to say in situations, how to make good choices, how to behave such as knowing how to share, or waiting your turn.  

Recommended Activity: Month 7 Activity 12, Have a child practice knocking on a door before entering the room to teach respect.

Positive Self-Concept

How one feels about themselves.

Recommended Activity: Month 6 Activity 13, Help find a “special talent” within your child and let them know they excel in that area. Try not to falsify or give too general of praise, such as “ Good Job” this can actually be harmful in the long run to your child.

2. Communication

Transferring information to another person via speaking, singing and writing or even non-verbally using body language, gestures or tone and pitch of voice.

Recommended Activity: Month 5 Activity 26, encourage your child to put on an “ABC” performance!

3. Higher Order Thinking

This is knowing how to solve problems, make decisions, and to think critically such as analyzing a situation, predict an outcome, and so on. Remember that any problem for a preschooler to solve requires higher order thinking.  It doesn’t have to be complicated. 

Recommended Activities: Month 12 Activity 14, Play the “What If” game.  Another   activity, take a trip to the playground.  Playgrounds offer a fun and safe environment to practice problem solving and critical thinking.

4. Self-Control

The ability to control one’s emotion, behavior, and desires especially in difficult situations

Recommended Activity: Month 10 Activity 12, Marshmallow Experiment. Here is an example.


  1. “ What If Everybody Did That?” by Ellen Javernick. This book helps with the skills of higher order thinking and self control as it presents situation and asks “What if everybody did that?”  
  2. “Little White Owl” by Tracey Corderoy. The story is about making friends and how friends have many wonderful differences but we can still learn from each other.
  3. “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen.  It shares the power of positive choices so can be used to share self-concept skills and social skills and there are lots of rhymes.