Dear Camino Grove Family,

We want your child to be successful in school and that means supporting and encouraging their whole development. While excelling in academic classes is important, children also need skills to take on learning challenges, make good decisions, manage strong emotions, and get along with others.

This year, I will be visiting classrooms to provide lessons from Second Step Elementary, a research-based social-emotional learning program designed to improve children’s social-emotional skills. Second Step skills and concepts are designed to help children both in and out of school.

The Second Step program teaches skills in the following four areas:

1. Growth Mindset and Goal Setting: Students will learn how to pay attention and

manage distractions, develop a growth mindset, and apply goal-setting strategies to

their social and academic lives.

2. Emotion Management: Students learn how to identify and label emotions and use

emotion-management strategies- including stress management for older students- to

calm strong feelings.

3. Empathy and Kindness: Students learn how to recognize kindness and act kindly,

have empathy for others and take others’ perspectives, and recognize kind acts and

empathy as important elements of building and maintaining relationships.

4. Problem Solving: Students learn how to identify and state a problem, recognize if a

problem is an accident, and use the STEP problem-solving process:

S: Say the problem

T: Think of solutions

E: Explore the outcomes

P: Pick the best solution

If you have any questions about the Second Step program, please feel free to contact me for more information. Thank you for your support as we work to build a safe and supportive school community