| By: Kim Gulbrandson Expand Your Bullying Prevention Toolkit with Social-Emotional Learning Every year schools and communities across the country unite in their bullying prevention efforts during the month of October for National Bullying Prevention Month. Does this mean that if you focus on bullying prevention for one month you’re done? Not at all! This month is meant to jump-start continued efforts to prevent bullying. And social-emotional learning can make a great addition to the toolkit that helps you do this.Read More
| By: Kim Gulbrandson Time to Get Excited about Social-Emotional Learning! As we gear up for the upcoming school year and continue planning to lay the foundation for children to become knowledgeable, responsible, and caring adults, I wanted to share a few SEL highlights to energize you as you begin 2015–2016: Read More
| By: Committee for Children Book Review: Not in Room 204 When a teacher goes beyond a standard “stranger danger” lesson to tell her class it's more likely to be someone a child knows who touches a child inappropriately and that she would help anyone who had a touching problem, this is just the information and encouragement young Regina needs to report her own scary secret. Read More
| By: Committee for Children He Just Disclosed in Class! What Do I Do? The goal of the Child Protection Unit lessons is to develop students' ability to recognize, report, and refuse unsafe or sexually abusive situations. During the lessons, students will hear stories and scenarios about children in unsafe and potentially abusive situations who use their skills to stay safe. This may prompt students to disclose information about similar situations in their own lives, sometimes in the middle of a lesson in front of the entire class! Needless to say, this can put teachers in an uncomfortable position, and in the moment it's hard to know how to respond.Read More
| By: Committee for Children The Second Step Child Protection Unit: A New Approach to Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect Committee for Children has long been at the forefront of the effort to prevent child sexual abuse. In fact child sexual abuse prevention was the goal of Committee for Children's first published curriculum, the Talking About Touching program. Committee for Children has come a long way since then, bringing the power of social-emotional learning into schools around the world with the Second Step program and helping prevent bullying with the Second Step: Bullying Prevention Unit. Much has also changed in the field of child abuse prevention since the release of the Talking About Touching program, so Committee for Children recently returned to its roots and created the Child Protection Unit, a new Second Step unit designed to help protect children from sexual abuse and other forms of abuse and neglect. Read More
| By: Committee for Children Four Tips for Creating a Safe and Supportive Classroom It's Monday morning, and your student Charlie storms in, pushing people and throwing things. With Charlie, there are lots of days like this, especially after the weekend. But what you do next can make a big difference to Charlie's day, to your day, and to his overall experience in school. Senior Program Developer Bridgid Normand gives four practical tips for creating an environment in which Charlie and all your other students can learn. Read More
| By: Tonje Molyneux Welcome Wave of Change: Positive Discipline and SEL in Schools I bet you can easily conjure up an image of a school teacher rapping the knuckles of a naughty girl with a ruler. Or a principal paddling the bottom of a boisterous boy. For a long time, this was how students were disciplined in school. They were physically punished with rulers, straps, paddles, or hands. Or shamed by being made to stand in the corner, wear a dunce cap, or write lines on the board. Perhaps you think these harsh, punitive discipline practices are a relic of a past, something we now only see in old movies or on episodes of The Simpsons. But in 19 states it’s still legal to use corporal punishment in schools.1 And since the late 1980s, zero-tolerance policies have resulted in thousands of students being excluded from schools, their right to an education stripped away for infractions sometimes as minor as chewing gum. Read More
| By: Committee for Children Talking About Tough Topics with Tweens: Part 2 of 2 We’ve also been talking about the difference between unsafe and unwanted touch. When I asked nine-year-old Etta to give me an example of unsafe touch, my witty child walked over to Amos and slugged him. “Correct!” I crowed. Amos remarked drily, “It was unwanted, too.” Read More
| By: Committee for Children Talking About Tough Topics with Tweens: Part 1 of 2 Talking about tough topics, in addition to being an excellent tongue-twister, is a skill every parent needs to master, or at least muddle through. As someone who once found the perfect moment to talk about sex with her five and eight year old children after hearing an NPR story about drive-up windows for boar semen (“What are they even talking about, Mom?”), I am a big fan of seizing natural opportunities. Of course, sometimes those opportunities don’t come soon enough, and we need to nudge them along.Read More
| By: Committee for Children Book review: Talk About Touch by Sandra Kleven. Illustrated by Patrick Minock Reading Level: Preschool–Grade 2 Set in a traditional Alaska Native village, Talk About Touch is an exceptionally gentle, caring story about children and parents talking about personal safety and, in particular, sexual abuse. Eric is a young boy whose father, while working with him on their snowmobile, broaches… Read More