Skillsville content is developed with 3 curricular pillars: executive function skills, self-regulation strategies, and career exposure.
What do executive functioning skills look like?
Executive functioning is a set of mental skills that we rely on every day to help us learn, work, and manage activities of daily living. Our child and family facing content refers to EF skills as “Success Skills” to offer an accessible term for these important, everyday skills. “Pause” serves as the foundational skill of our curriculum and content and is the childfriendly term we use to refer to the following EF skills: self-monitoring, impulse control, and emotion recognition. “Pause” is introduced before a self-regulation strategy is enacted. Self-regulation strategies are tools and techniques that help achieve calmness and concentration, to prime the brain to effectively use executive functioning skills.
What do self-regulation strategies look like?
Identification of strategies was based on categories outlined in the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist (CCSC-R1; Program for Prevention Research, 2009) and other peer-reviewed resources. These strategies are accessible for children of various backgrounds and lived experiences and cater to a myriad of learning styles.
What does career exploration look like?
Our research findings indicate that children in our target age demographic are not thinking or talking about career pathways. Instead, they are learning that there are a variety of careers in the world, questioning how and why they are distinct from each other, and exploring various careers’ alignment with their current interests. Recent children’s media trends also support this developmentally appropriate exploration of passions and interests.