El trabajo tiene como objetivo exponer los fundamentos teóricos y metodológicos para diseñar e implementar un currículum encaminado al desarrollo de habilidades sociales y emocionales dentro de las escuelas preescolares del contexto latinoamericano. Se señalan las razones que justifican la incorporación de un programa de desarrollo socioemocional en el currículum preescolar, las bases teóricas que fundamentan la importancia de la enseñanza directa de esta área de desarrollo psicológico infantil, así como los hallazgos de investigaciones empíricas realizadas en el contexto hispano y latinoamericano. Se concluye con la exposición de los lineamientos para la implementación de un currículum que abarque la enseñanza de la competencia social y emocional en escuelas preescolares latinoamericanas, fundamentados a nivel teórico y metodológico.

Shared story time reading promotes psychological abilities which are important in child development, including linguistic, conceptual and socio-emotional skills. The propose of the study was to analyse the relation between the actions of preschool children´s mothers with the types of interaction and the behaviour showed by their children during dyadic story time activities. This was an observational-analytic study. We studied 30 mothers with children (13 girls and 17 boys; average age five years) registered in third-grade preschool from a public school of low sociocultural level. Each pair was filmed in two sessions and analysed through taxonomy of behavioural categories. Initial data showed that most mothers presented limited skills as storytellers, readers, promoters of linguistic interactions and as informal teachers. The differences between groups and the correlations among maternal-infant behavioural categories indicated synchrony between the behaviour in the mothers and the performance on the child, particularly on the linguistic interactions.