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Students using PATHS(R) Feeling Face Cards (50202)

 

PATHS® Program Objectives and Goals

The PATHS® program is an elementary school curriculum that has been shown to significantly improve children's social and emotional skills. Social and emotional competence is a master skill that underlies both effective behavior and academic success.

The PATHS program covers these five domains of social and emotional development:

Student demonstrating How to do Turtle from the PATHS(R) program. Products displayed: How To Do Turtle Poster (501315). Turtle Puppet (500411)
  • self-control
  • emotional understanding
  • positive self-esteem
  • relationships
  • interpersonal problem-solving skills.

The PATHS program brings students through each of these domains in stages. While some of the units from the PATHS program target one or more of the domains, aspects of all five are integrated into each unit.

Each new unit builds on the learning that preceded it. The lessons are sequenced according to increasing developmental difficulty. However, teachers may delay a specific lesson until later in the sequence to make sure that it matches their students' emotional readiness.

To ensure continual reinforcement of key skills from the PATHS program, supplemental activities and a variety of at-home activities are included for parents and children to do together.

The PATHS program provides teachers and counselors with a systematic developmental approach for enhancing social and emotional understanding and academic competence in children.

Educational Objectives and Goals for Grades 1-5/6

The PATHS Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, and Grade 5/6 classroom modules specifically address the following goals:

  1. To establish and reinforce basic classroom rules
  2. To strengthen self-control and encourage reflective thinking in the classroom
  3. To improve children's communication skills with adults and peers
  4. To use literature to discuss and promote prosocial, responsible behavior
  5. To increase children's abilities to identify, understand, and discuss the variety of feelings people experience in their daily lives
  6. To enhance children's abilities to recognize and interpret similarities and differences in the feelings, reactions, and points of view in themselves and others
  7. To build character development through the reading of "role-model" biographies
  8. To promote the development of empathy and perspective-taking
  9. To help children use social problem-solving skills to prevent and/or resolve problems and conflicts in social interactions
  10. To support children in using these skills to improve classroom ecology and academic success.
Teacher and students using the PATHS(R) program. Product displayed: Twiggle Learns To Do Turtle Storybook (501309)

Educational Objectives and Goals for Preschool/Kindergarten

The PATHS Preschool/Kindergarten classroom module specifically addresses the following goals:

  1. To increase children's self-control
  2. To increase children's ability to get along with others by improving friendship skills (sharing, caring, and other social skills)
  3. To enhance children's self-esteem, self-confidence, and ability to give and receive compliments
  4. To increase children's understanding and communication of the vocabulary of emotions (verbal mediation and dialoguing about feelings with others)
  5. To help children recognize and understand how one's behavior affects others
  6. To increase children's understanding and use of logical reasoning and problem-solving vocabulary
  7. To improve children's knowledge of, and skill in, the steps of social problem solving.

The PATHS® program is proven effective in Head Start classrooms! The curriculum also:

  • helps meet Head Start's social and emotional development goals for school readiness
  • addresses the Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support domains of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) tool.

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