Expanded curriculum at Elbridge Elementary focuses on building students' pro-social skills

Elbridge Elementary students across all grade levels are learning how to maintain healthy relationships, and how to appropriately share their emotions with both adults and their peers thanks to expanded “Second Step Curriculum.”

This new curriculum used to be taught within just two grade levels. This school year, it has expanded into all EE classrooms, from 4YP to 3^rd grade. Second Step is a pro-social skill building curriculum.

Here’s how it works: Guidance Counselors Nikki Bloodgood and Rob McIntyre visit classrooms at the start of a week, to introduce a new behavior-specific topic, such as sharing. They’ll show a picture of students, like what you see on the right, and ask students to interpret what’s happening. From there, the counselors will lead students through prompts and activities to dig deeper into the topic. Throughout the rest of that week, teachers can use the online platform to run quick, 10-15-minute-long lessons that complement the strategies introduced.

“I try to explain to the kids it’s like a toolbox that you carry with you at all times,” expanded McIntyre. “As you get older, that toolbox gets more and more full of different strategies depending on what you’re doing at that grade level and who you are interacting with.”

The goal is to get students to better understand their feelings, and use their words, along with the strategies of the second step program, to diffuse altercations before they even begin.

“Incidents between students don’t reach the level of adults needing to step in,” said McIntyre. “It gives us the opportunity to mitigate a lot of those circumstantial things that happen in a classroom, and dramatically reduce the retaliation that goes along with it.”

Strategies differ depending on grade-level. For EE’s youngest learners, an example would be belly breathing. Students are taught to breath deeply when they feel angry, and to focus on what they can control. As they get older, those strategies will build upon each other, giving students new techniques to stack in their toolboxes.

“The kids enjoy the lessons, and therefore they remember them,” added Bloodgood.

“Second Step Curriculum” can even go beyond the classroom. There are plenty of resources, available in both English and Spanish, that can be sent home to families to help parents and guardians understand what their students are learning at school.