Welcome!
We grow into adults who shape the world, we are children who learn from it. In this course you will explore tools to help your students learn strategies to overcome challenges, bounce back, and communicate their feelings. This course will offer you ideas about starting conversations shaped by curiosity; strategies to help children tackle problems; and activities that promote engagement and persistence—tools to help your students develop the social emotional skills that form a strong foundation for their academic learning and success beyond the classroom. Caring Communities was created not only to provide educators with resources to promote resilience, but to provide tools to help children communicate their needs and wants, enabling you to build stronger relationships with your students.
This interactive course includes four units:
- Unit 1: Special, Strong, and Growing
- Unit 2: The Power of Persistence
- Unit 3: Feelings Big and Small
- Unit 4: My Safe Place
Within each unit, we’ve included specific resources to guide your own professional development, as well as materials to share with your students in Pre-K to 2nd Grade, and with their families at home!
- Lesson 1, Resources at the Ready, will include a brief overview of each unit’s topic and questions to guide your work!
- Lesson 2, Provider Planning, has resources to level up your own knowledge and skills.
- In Lesson 3 (Student Support) and Lesson 4 (Community Caregiving), you will explore assets and activities to share with your students, and resources to be used by families at home!
- A quick quiz in Lesson 5, Close Out, reinforces the knowledge you’ve gained in the unit.
While each unit includes resources to be used across any number of days, we’ve tried to include enough materials for two weeks’ worth of educational programming.
Upon course completion, you’ll have access to an interactive guide of the resources from each unit that you can use with children and families.
We hope you find much to value in our course. Together, we can build confident children who can be a part of helping us create smarter, stronger, kinder communities!
Welcome!
As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. For a child, that village might be made up of family, friend, and neighbor caregivers (FFNCs). These caring adults are essential to the wellbeing of children, but as a group they’re too often overlooked. This course highlights strategies and resources to help you connect with and support FFNCs.
This course includes resources, activity ideas, and guidance for applying what you’ve learned in your work with FFNCs. You might incorporate these materials into your organization’s programming calendar as stand-alone activities or as a series of full-fledged workshop sessions. By the end of this course, you’ll feel empowered to use these materials in any ways that work for you. Also, by completing the Unit Assessments, you’ll be able to receive a Certificate of Completion.
Course Structure
Across 7 units, you’ll explore simple ways to support and elevate the quality of connections and care that FFN caregivers give to children. Plus, you’ll walk away with a plan of action to apply what you’ve learned in your setting.
- Unit 1: Caring for Kids
- Unit 2: Brain Builders
- Unit 3: R is for Routines
- Unit 4: R is for Relationships – Managing Feelings
- Unit 5: R is for Relationships – Learning Through Play
- Unit 6: R is for Respectful Communication
- Unit 7: My Facilitator Action Plan
Course Goals
Upon completion of this course, trainers will be able to:
- Learn how to effectively train FFNCs in utilizing resources.
- Explore ways to help FFNCs to understand the important role they play in children’s lives.
- Communicate strategies to FFNCs that support children’s development and learning.
- Suggest strategies for FFNCs to communicate effectively with the parents of children in their care.
- Create a customized action plan to embed these resources in their work.
Thanks for joining us for Welcoming Others, a short course to help you support families affected by crisis and conflict.
Every day, children and families around the world—and in your own community—are affected by conflict, crisis, and traumatic experiences. In big and small ways, support from providers, peers, and members of their wider community can help welcome them into new spaces and begin a process of healing.
What does crisis mean? A moment of crisis can include any time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger. Crises can include a natural disaster or weather event, sudden separation from loved ones, or displacement due to conflict or other hardship, among other circumstances.
It’s natural for a crisis to catch us off guard. But crises can happen to anyone, even to those in your community. The good news is, the caring presence of a trusted adult and empathetic, nurturing interactions with children and families affected by crisis really can make a positive difference.
You can help.
The reality is, no matter your specific role, or how much you interact with children and families each day, it’s likely that at some point you will encounter someone who’s been affected by conflict or crisis. You might know someone right now, and there are simple, manageable things you can start with to help that person feel safer, more understood, welcomed, and resilient.
You don’t need to be an expert in child development to benefit from this course. It is designed to help any caring grown-up—like you—embrace the role you can play in helping children and grown-ups reconnect and build on their inherent dignity, strength, and resilience.
We’re so grateful and inspired that you have decided to invest your time and energy in learning how to better serve children and families in some of the most challenging moments of their lives. We’re confident this short course will help you feel more comfortable in taking the first steps on this journey. We encourage you to leverage the ideas and resources in this course to complement the role you play in your community to help families feel welcomed and begin to heal and thrive.
By the end of this brief course, you will walk away with new insights, strategies, and a toolkit of resources and activities that you can share and practice with families.
NOTE: While developing this course, we included themes and resources that would be particularly helpful to children and families who’ve been uprooted from their homes or country of origin, whether due to natural disaster, conflict, or some other reason. Because of that, you’ll see and hear references to “newcomers” or families “joining your community.”
More often than not, the strategies mentioned for this group of children and families are broadly applicable to families who have experienced other types of traumas or crises as well. As always, keep an open mind, engage your curiosity, and ask yourself, “How can I apply what I’m learning here to my own relationships, workplace, or community?”
Throughout this course, you’ll hear from a few key experts. These individuals have varied and extensive experience helping young children and families cope with conflict, crisis, and traumatic experiences. We are so grateful for their contributions to this course.
Ann Thomas, LCSW, RPT/S
President/CEO of The Children's Place
Stephen Cozza, MD, COL, U.S. Army Retired
Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics
Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Department of Psychiatry, USUHS
Rebecca Ford-Paz, PhD
Clinical Child Psychologist
Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health & the Center for Childhood Resilience
Co-Director of the Forensic Assessment for Immigration Relief (FAIR) Clinic
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
Associate Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Stephanie A. Gonzalez-Martinez
Las Cruces Children's Coordinator
Save The Children | Border Servant Corps
Welcome!
As early-childhood educators, we have huge goals for ourselves and the children in our care. Our aim is to teach kids about themselves, their peers, and the world around them. Our biggest dreams are to help children thrive into becoming kind, healthy, smart, and successful adults who make the world better. By maximizing children’s potential, we maximize the potential for the world we all live in.
Over the course of five units, you’ll get a chance to explore strategies and resources to use with children and families that promote learning through curiosity and community! Watch videos, study strategies, and reflect in forums on how to make these lessons live in your own learning spaces.
- Unit 1: A Welcoming Community: Foster a sense of belonging in your learning community using physical space and preparation.
- Unit 2: Knowing My Community: Provide opportunities for children to know themselves and each other.
- Unit 3: Better Together: Extend children’s prosocial skills with tactics that promote positive interaction.
- Unit 4: Creative Problem-Solving: Promote collaborative problem-solving for challenges that arise.
- Unit 5: A Wider World: Use skills and strategies to keep growing beyond your program.
Children grow and learn from their experiences and in relation to one another. Together with Sesame Street in Communities, explore the ways that everyone in a learning community can teach and learn together in order to be stronger, smarter, and kinder!
WATCH: Meet the Providers: Joseph and Callie