Photo: flickr
The intervention is called the Early Childhood Friendship Project (ECFP). It's an eight-week program using puppets, stories and activities appropriate for preschoolers that can easily be folded into existing curriculum.
It's a 10-minute puppet show that emphasizes a different theme each of the eight weeks. The puppet presents a developmental problem the children are likely to encounter and asks their help to solve the problem.
Interventionists are also in the classroom about three hours a week, reinforcing and praising positive behaviors. The children, meantime, are also looking for these behaviors and reporting when they see others doing good things.
"We still need more work before we can export this on a larger scale," says Jamie Ostrov, who is an associate professor in the UB Department of Psychology and lead author of the paper with Stephanie Godleski, now an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "But fundamentally, it won't require a lot of training and it can be done with one teacher in the classroom."
Category(s):Bullying, Child and/or Adolescent Issues
Source material from University at Buffalo
