What is PATHS?
Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies is a Health and Wellbeing
programme. It aims to help children to be aware of their feelings, to be able
to talk about them and to find good ways of dealing with uncomfortable
feelings. It also teaches the children problem solving skills and helps them to
develop good relationships with their peers.
Each week the children will have a circle time where they will have the
opportunity to learn about and discuss their feelings, with the help of
Twiggle and his puppet friends.
As part of this time the children are going to be learning about
compliments. Each week a child will be chosen to be Twiggle’s special helper
and will receive compliments from the rest of the children that will be
written up and given home at the end of the week in a special certificate.
When it is your child’s turn, we ask that you would also share a compliment
with them. We hope that this will help the children to develop in their self
esteem and the support and respect they show each other as friends
Here are some suggestions of things you can be doing at home to support
and develop this learning;
• Talk to your child about their feelings
• Encourage them to name their feelings
• Ask them how they know someone is feeling a particular way by looking
for facial clues
• Ask them to give you real life examples of how they feel so they can
link their experiences to their feelings.
• Encourage them to recognise how other people might be feeling, e.g.
family members or characters in books or films
