- Hi, welcome to Home to School Connection, Skills for Success.

I'm Denise Pazuchanics from the WQED Education Team - And I am Michelle Imler.

Thank you for joining us as we share with you our three-prong approach for educators, caregivers, and children.

We all know how important kindergarten readiness is to the beginning of a child's school career.

And with this three-pronged approach, you will be able to take whatever kindergarten readiness skill you would like and put it into this program.

Here are some of the domains of kindergarten readiness.

Language literacy, cognition and general knowledge, approaches towards learning, physical wellbeing and motor development, social and emotional.

And with this approach, you can choose to pick whatever domain you would like.

The skills for success is super important because it helps to make that home-to-school connection, which helps to improve academic achievement, a more positive attitude, confidence in a child, and enhances relationships with parents, peers, and teachers.

The Skills for Success program will offer three important parts, professional development for educators, a curated list of resources for caregivers and educators, and an interactive engagement for families that will also include a kit packed to be used at home.

- So while this Skills for Success program uses this three-prong approach, what we've done for this particular session is help you come up with a way to fill materials and resources for each of those pieces.

So we'll start with the professional development piece.

As educators, it's always a great idea to be able to provide additional information to other educators.

So on a variety of topics, like we said, we really want to cover kindergarten readiness in these sessions.

So what we did was we wanted to offer a variety of professional development sessions to local Headstart and early childhood educators, all revolving around topics that could be used for kindergarten readiness in their classroom.

We started with information and resources all available from PBS Learning Media.

Working from WQED, we know that that is a trusted resource for educators and a great place to start.

So at PBS Learning Media, you can find a variety of learning media, including articles, you can find lesson plans, you can find activities, videos and they are available on a variety of topics.

So classroom teachers, educators can use this site directly, but what we find to be helpful is being able to curate a list for them.

So kind of wade through all of the information available and be able to pull out the information surrounding a particular topic.

So that's the first place that we started.

You can also use PBS Learning Media to provide a professional development session for educators.

So in addition to being able to provide resources that they can use in their classroom, you can already find locked and loaded professional development sessions on also a variety of topics.

So you'll see that here are some about nurturing curiosity and critical thinking.

There's way to, there's a session on developing cultural awareness.

There are ways to talk about social and emotional learning.

So these sessions are already available on PBS Learning Media.

So if you can't provide in-person training or if there isn't somebody local to provide that training, PBS Learning Media can do that for you with their professional learning series.

The second important piece, as Michelle mentioned, are the caregiver materials.

So we went to PBS Parents for these caregiver materials.

PBS Parents is a clearing house.

It's totally searchable, and it's a way for parents to be able to find articles.

They can find activities, they can find videos that are parent focused and kid focused, all on a variety of kindergarten readiness topics.

Here is an example of some of the different kinds of articles that you will find.

Again, some are focused more for students, some are focused more for adults.

There are things like book lists and articles.

There are crafts, there are activities, there are ways for them to engage with their child and do activities that come already listed.

There are recipes available as well, but there are a plethora of caregiver materials that you can find directly on PBS Learning, PBS Parents as well.

The third piece of this third prong approach is being able to engage with students.

So we were able to offer a virtual piece that included caregivers and students together, but you can also do this in person.

So these student kits were packed in a way that students could engage with their families.

It also contained a resource list that had other suggested videos, materials, there were articles, there were recipes, there were activities to do.

There are sometimes books that can be included, they're completely customizable on your topic and what works for you.

The idea though, is to be able to provide a caregiver and a student a way to interact with that topic.

And again, part of what we were able to do was curate a list of materials that you can use in your community or as an example to get you started on a way to curate your own list.

So this three-pronged approach has been working with our early childhood educators for the past two years.

So in the past two years, we've been able to curate two kits for you.

The first one surrounding general knowledge.

We have sorting, shadows, senses, and shapes.

And you will notice that there are caregiver letters, there are educator letters, there are material listings and resources that go with each of those topics.

- And for year two, our partner had suggested that they had a need for social emotional learning topics.

So we were able to curate a four-part sessions for big feelings, self-confidence, perseverance and responsibility.

- All of this is available on our webpage, Skills for Success at WQED.org.

And you can find all of the materials needed, including additional videos for both the family engagement piece and the professional development piece.

This is used, this can be used as a full package in your educator space or you could think about ways to actually use it, use the model for your own community's needs.

We hope that you find it useful, and if you need to, feel free to reach out to us with questions.

Thanks for listening.