Promoting Affective Thinking Skills – SVVSD Adopted Preschool Curriculum
The PATHS® curriculum is used in all of our preschool classrooms as a comprehensive program for promoting emotional and social competencies and reducing aggression and behavior issues with preschool-aged children while simultaneously enhancing the educational process in the preschool classroom. This preschool curriculum is designed to be used by educators and counselors during preschool as a universal prevention model. Although primarily focused on the school and classroom settings, information and activities are also included for use with parents — contact your child’s preschool teacher to find out more about this curriculum.
The PATHS® Curriculum:
- Is people-centric: The teacher leads units and activities, fully integrating the program into the ongoing curriculum.
- Increases children’s self-control.
- Increases children’s ability to get along with others by improving friendship skills (sharing, caring, and other social skills).
- Enhances children’s self-esteem, self-confidence, and ability to give and receive compliments.
- To increase children’s understanding and communication of the vocabulary of emotions (verbal mediation and dialoguing about feelings with others).
- Helps children recognize and understand how one’s behavior affects others.
- Increases children’s understanding and use of logical reasoning and problem-solving vocabulary.
- Improves children’s knowledge of, and skill in, the steps of social problem solving.
Your Partner in Your Student’s Success
“As parents, we all want our children to succeed in life. While success in school is important, it’s not the only thing. Since babies don’t come with an instruction manual, parents learn “on the job.” And you teach your children so much, including how to share and be a friend, be responsible, be a good brother or sister, follow instructions, and care for their toys and things. When children go to school, these same life lessons can look like getting along with others, working together in groups, sharing ideas, listening to others… and learning from your mistakes, as well as many others. These and many other skills can fall under the umbrella of life skills, otherwise known as social emotional learning (SEL) (Source, 9/9/24).”
PATHS Curriculum is about helping students learn life skills and remove learning barriers that hinder success in school, career, and life. It teaches kids and students how to build healthy relationships and calm down in stressful situations so they can make responsible decisions. By partnering with you and your school, our programs create calm classrooms by developing positive behaviors that help students thrive in real-world situations. Research shows that students do better in school when they are able to focus on a test or academic subject instead of their personal problems.
- Real World Success — PATHS helps students develop the skills they need to succeed in school and life, such as self-control, problem-solving, and decision-making.
- Make Better Choices — PATHS helps students develop healthy relationships with peers and adults, reducing bullying, fighting, and negative peer pressure to try drugs, alcohol, and/or vaping.
- Increased Resiliency — PATHS curriculum teaches students to recognize and manage how they react to other people and situations, helping them bounce back quicker from difficulties, learn from mistakes, and make better choices in the future.
Sources:
- Adapted from this Source, 9/9/24 – Parent information regarding PATHS
- See this link for an article about how Columbine Elementary PK in SVVSD uses PATHS