Building Capacity in Military-Connected Schools

Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices

http://nrepp.samhsa.gov

Goals: To help socialize young children so that they can express their feelings, relate to others, use self-control, resolve problems, make safe choices, and have an environment in which they can practice these skills.

Target Outcomes:Reduce children’s use of substances and increase their social skills and parental involvement.

Target Populations: Children ages 3 to 8 who exhibit early violent, antisocial or sexual behavior.

Problem:To reduce early childhood signs of potential violence, early sexual or drug abuse, and antisocial behavior.

Intervention:

• 5 to 24 weeks for the program
• Individual:
• Life/ social skills training
• Classroom lessons to address substance addiction and abuse
• Social group work in combination with social skills education
• Family:
• Parent education
• Peer:
• Classroom and peer activities created to develop expression, communication, positive peer relationships and independent thinking
• School:
• Life skills training with student role playing
• Changes in teaching approaches and parental involvement
• In/After-School classes
• Teacher delivers 10 to 15 minute lessons twice a week:
• They involve the hand puppet Al and his friends Ty and Keisha and they involve the students in singing, role playing and modeling positive social behaviors. Teachers then model and reinforce the skills throughout the day.
• Booster session:
• Nine-lessons of follow up are used in second or third grade children who were previously involved in the program.
• Parent Training:
• Sessions designed to teach parents how to express their feelings, listen to their children, become involved meaningfully, hold high expectations for their children,

Resources :

• Classroom curriculum kit containing the tools for the 46 lesson.
• $1000 to $5000 cost for the program training and materials

Setting:

• Rural, Urban, or Suburban

Results:

• Significant decreases in negative behaviors in response to problems.
• Significant reduction in problem social behaviors
• Participants are two to five times more likely to improve their use of positive classroom skills in response to problems.
• Participants are 1.5 to 4 times more likely to actually use their positive response skills than children who did not participate.

Reproduction

• This program had multiple successful program implementations in many states around the US.