Emotional ABCs

1.) Emotional ABCs is an evidence-based Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum that teaches children, ages 4-11, effective tools for better emotional regulation. Our program teaches children how to figure out what they’re feeling, why they’re experiencing that emotion, and how to make better choices in response to what they're going through. These skills can make all the difference in how well children are able to learn. 2) Emotional ABCs is currently free to teachers in brick-and-mortar public and private schools and is used by teachers and school counselors in 65,000 schools across the USA and in more than 90 countries. 3) Emotional ABCs is not yet available in languages other than English, but once it is, then together with translated editions of our included offline Workshops our program really can have an impact worldwide. Emotional skills help children learn better and live better.

Better emotional skills are tools for a better life. They give you the opportunity to make better choices in so many parts of each day. And learning the basic emotional regulation information included in the Emotional ABCs is the first step to these improved emotional regulation outcomes. Emotional skills are not new skills for human beings but Social Emotional Learning is a new way of educating children about these tools. It is only now that people are starting to realize just how important Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is for almost any type of learning environment for young people. If you are struggling with your emotions, how to understand them and how to manage them, then you cannot focus on the learning that you need to get done in order to improve your life. Emotional ABCs is in some ways like a driver education class for the emotional road. These lessons can be invaluable. In some ways Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills can be very complicated (just like learning to drive) but, like with learning to read, the basics can also be as simple as A, B, and C.

Emotional ABCs is, quite literally, the ABCs of emotional regulation. We teach children what emotions are. For example: What are you feeling? How do you know you're experiencing an emotion? What is your body telling you that gives you clues to what you might be feeling? Then our program teaches children to reach back to try to figure out the reasons underlying what they may be experiencing. What happened to get you to be having this emotion? And, lastly, the program focuses on how we can make better choices in response to our feelings. If you imagine, for example, a mere week in your own life, and then consider how that same week might have been different if you had made better emotional choices in only ten percent of your decisions that week, you can begin to realize the power of better emotional regulation. Emotional ABCs uses video, interactive games, and offline practice (on paper and in the classroom) to teach each of these tools in small cumulative steps.

Emotional ABCs is currently free to teachers and school counselors worldwide since we believe a professional educator is the best person to be able to work on these SEL skills with students. Emotional ABCs has designed their program so that it is easy to use and teachers can jump right in to begin teaching these skills. In fact, Stanford Research International has applied to the US Department of Education for a $3 million grant specifically to study how teachers have been able to use our program effectively with "no training necessary" all across the USA. Our focus since the beginning with Emotional ABCs has been to design our program so that parents or teachers can teach these skills that they too have perhaps never officially studied or perfectly mastered.

"Increase the engagement of learners in remote, hybrid, and physical environments, including strategies and tools for parental support, peer interaction, and guided independent work."

Emotional ABCs Classroom was originally designed for teacher-led "in class" instruction from our Workshops. These Workshops include online materials but are mostly designed for offline instruction by a teacher using teacher-student and student-student interaction.

During the pandemic, we expanded our Free Teacher offering to include the ability for teachers to instruct remotely using live screensharing with their students doing distance learning from our Lesson List. Although we think this virtual instruction is "less optimal" than having a professional instructor interacting with students and a class in the room, we (and the teachers) found that it worked pretty well.

Emotional ABCs has developed a series of online and offline offerings for School to Home SEL instruction. These include emailed (or printed) lessons/instructions for how parents might include social emotional learning activities in the home. We think that getting parents to learn these tools (actively or passively) while they teach their own children can be an invaluable part of the process.

In addition, printables from our Workshops are designed so that children can work independently in the classroom on SEL skills practice assignments. 

Our program is currently used by teachers and school counselors in more than 65,000 schools across the USA and, although we only began offering the program to teachers outside the USA a few months back, it is now used in more than 90 countries.

There are other Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs both in the USA and elsewhere both as apps and web applications and, of course, pen and paper options. We believe our program is the most beloved and most successful because ours is the slowest. What we mean by this is that we believe our program goes as slow as necessary for each child, if possible, to learn each letter of their Emotional ABCs. Just like learning to read, it is letter by letter. And you need to repeat the letters in different ways so that the children learn them and know how to use them before moving onto the next letter, and the next word in their emotional vocabulary. Only then can you begin to speak the language of emotions. Also, of course, our program is funny. Our character's name is Moody. It's hard for him to learn. He struggles and stumbles and fails. And the kids have to help him learn these skills too. The children teach Moody how to use his Emotional ABCs.

Our program is currently used by teachers in more than 65,000 schools across the USA and in more than 10,000 other schools in more than 90 countries. This is with minimal advertising and with only having begun two years ago to offer the Free Teacher program in the USA and only having offered the Free to Teachers Worldwide program for three months.

We would hope that these numbers would grow as teachers begin to share their successes with other teachers in their schools and districts.

Unfortunately, our measurable indicators are somewhat limited. We can see how we're doing by measuring how many teachers use our program, how that use is growing, and the feedback that we get from teachers, school counselors, and parents.

We currently have a staff that includes all of the above. (Full time, part-time, contractors, and the like.) Employees being able to work remotely has been quite helpful for us. 

I guess our team is best positioned to do our program because we already have. My co-founder (and wife) and I have spent ten years seven days a week working to build Emotional ABCs. We have multiple graduate degrees, have lived in many countries, speak quite a few languages (badly), have taught for decades, have worked with children with learning challenges, and have quite a bit of life experience (i.e. we're not software founders in their twenties). In addition, to build the program we have worked with psychologists, therapists, college professors, childhood educators, artists, writers, designers, musicians, composers, actors, cartoonists, and, of course, software engineers. 

 We originally started on this journey because we were trying to help our own child with learning basic emotional tools and being told by two psychologists in a row that there was no basic primer on the subject. Feeling rebuffed, we researched and found that indeed none existed. We decided to work with experts and make one. 

Most of the people who work on the Emotional ABCs team are women and mothers and we believe this has had a huge impact. In addition, we have made a concerted effort to reach out to underrepresented groups to get their take on issues as we've built our program.

We are a small company. We firmly believe that outside advice and perspective would be invaluable to us. Yes, the possibility of an investor might be nice, but external, fresh, and smart perspectives on our mission might be worth more than their weight in gold. Really.

We really don't know what we don't know at this point. We do feel that our world is small in some ways since we have now spent 10+ years on "product" and we could benefit from external perspectives.

We don't know.

We are not 100% sure we qualify for this but we included an answer since the second question (see above) pushed us a bit to consider including a short answer. Emotional ABCs Classroom is project-based, it teaches educators about emotional skills development, and we think this kind of instruction is essential for every child to learn. We know that "core curriculum" is more often focused on other subjects, but we think these SEL skills are "core 21st century skills". Emotional skills are a major part of "helping students know themselves, know their options, and make informed decisions to achieve their education and career" goals.