Teaching Strategies GOLD®

• Teaching Strategies GOLD is an authentic, ongoing observational system for assessing children from birth through kindergarten. It helps teachers to observe children in the context of every day experiences, which is an effective way to learn what they know and can do. How does Teaching Strategies Gold® support your child’s learning? It’s based on 38 objectives for development and learning that focus on all the areas that are most important for school success: social–emotional, cognitive, math, literacy, physical, language, social studies, science and technology, and the arts. These objectives are built into every activity that happens in the classroom, which means that all day long, the teacher is helping your child build skills and knowledge in these important areas

Second Step Social Emotional

• When students enter kindergarten with the self-regulation and social-emotional skills taught with evidence-based Second Step® Early Learning, they’re set up for success.
• Skills for Learning: Children gain skills to help them be better learners, including how to focus their attention, listen carefully, and ask for help. Empathy: Children learn to identify and understand their own and others’ feelings. Children also learn how to show care for others. Emotion Management: Children learn how to calm down when they have strong feelings, such as worry or anger. Friendship Skills and Problem Solving: Children learn how to make and keep friends and to solve problems with others in a positive way.

Talking About Touching ® A Personal Safety Curriculum

• The Talking About Touching program for Preschool/Kindergarten focuses on teaching children basic skills designed to help them keep safe from dangerous or abusive situations. Despite good intentions to provide a safe environment for children, adults cannot always be there to protect children from every dangerous or abusive situation. Using the materials provided in the Talking About Touching kit, parents, caregivers, child-care providers, and teachers can work together to provide the rules, information, encouragement, and practice that children need to help protect themselves.

• What Approach Does the Talking About Touching Program Use?
• Unit I introduces common safety issues affecting children. Lesson topics include car safety, traffic safety, and fire safety. This basic context of safety is reinforced in Unit II, in which lessons about touching safety are introduced. Unit II opens with lessons that emphasize the positive aspects of touch in children’s everyday lives. The overall focus on safety, rather than sexuality, helps defuse the potentially difficult nature of talking to children about sexual abuse. This safety focus provides a straightforward way for adults and children to communicate about the subject.
• As a comprehensive personal safety program, the Talking About Touching curriculum teaches children simple safety rules that guide them toward safe decision making in a variety of situations:  traffic safety, finding weapons, responding to a fire emergency, getting permission from a parent, what is a safe touch and how to respond to unwanted touches, how to be assertive and how to ask for help.  Parents receive a preview before this is implemented.