Wellbeing – PATHS

PATHS

Promoting Alternative Thinking Styles
The PATHS program is offered at Findon Primary School from Foundation to Year 6 to promote the social and emotional development of our students.

The PATHS program helps children to:

• resolve conflicts peacefully
• handle emotions positively
• empathise
• make responsible decisions.

When students learn and use Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills, behaviour improves and disruptions lessen.

The PATHS program is a primary 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 behaviour and academic success.

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

• self-control
• emotional understanding
• positive self-esteem
• relationships
• interpersonal problem-solving skills.

The aims of PATHS are:

• To establish and reinforce basic classroom rules
• To strengthen self-control and encourage reflective thinking in the classroom
• To improve children’s communication skills with adults and peers
• To use literature to discuss and promote prosocial, responsible behaviour
• To increase children’s abilities to identify, understand, and discuss the variety of feelings people experience in their daily lives
• To enhance children’s abilities to recognise and interpret similarities and differences in the feelings, reactions, and points of view in themselves and others
• To promote the development of empathy and perspective-taking
• To help children use social problem-solving skills to prevent and/or resolve problems and conflicts in social interactions
• To support children in using these skills to improve the classroom environment and academic success.