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Home SMART Center Community Toolkit

Community Toolkit

A resources page for clinicians,teachers, and parents

Resources for teaching about emotional regulation and mental health support

Emotional regulation is a person’s ability to monitor and moderate an emotion or set of emotions, according to the American Psychological Association. Emotional regulation also helps individuals understand the meaning of their relationships with others, build mental resilience and form their identities.

Strengthening Relationships Through Positive Connections:Meaningful small steps to increase the quality of relationships

Helpful ways to calm down from stress or anxiety  and increase  your contributions to connections within the community.

 Social Emotional Literacy Manuals 

Bibliotherapy is a creative arts therapy that involves storytelling or the reading of specific texts. It uses an individual's relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. Bibliotherapy partially overlaps with, and is often combined with other types of therapeutic interventions.


Dr. Elswick provided her time and expertise to create a number of social-emotional educational curriculum specific to certain children's books. The book themed curriculum includes both teacher/ practitioner and parent activities aimed at improving social skills and empathy. The classroom-based/ session activities will be used to enhance emotional learning and improve social outcomes for the children in the school and therapy settings. The parent curriculum is aimed at encouraging parents to read to their children, discuss feelings and emotions, and encourage healthy emotional outcomes through daily parent-child activities. The curriculum will be made available to the teachers/ practitioners and parents in the community and will be continued each year. 

Dr. Elswick has continued her work and development of Social Emotional Learning Bibliotherapy and activity-based curriculum for teachers and caregivers. Since 2012, she has developed numerous curricula with the support of graduate and undergraduate students, community partners, and colleagues. To grow the knowledge, use, and skill of curriculum development in supporting social emotional programming for children and youth through the use of bibliotherapy techniques, Dr. Elswick has embedded an activity into her School Social Work Licensure courses at both the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.  Graduate and undergraduate students within this course learn the importance of social emotional development, bibliotherapy, and curriculum development for practice. Many of the bibliotherapy examples within the manual were developed by students in collaboration with Dr. Elswick and the clinical course.

As part of this educational process and collaboration, we wanted to provide the community and caregiver's resources that would assist in developing healthy serve and return interactions within the home environment. 
To view or download the curriculum please follow the links below:

Bibliotherapy Manual

Bibliotherapy Manual (Spanish)

Green Bibliotherapy Manual

Expressive Arts toolkit Manual

 

Facilitated Academic Support

The SMART Center has partnered with Walt Henley, PhD, a graduate student at the University of Memphis, to offer facilitated academic support as needed by Warm Line Managers. The partnership is based on the utilization of the following two websites:

WatchKnowLearn.org: Free K-12 Educational Videos
The site WatchKnowLearn has indexed approximately 50,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 5,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom, as well as parents and students at home 24/7. Tens of thousands of excellent, educational videos in a huge, intuitive directory. Organized, reviewed, rated, and described by teachers. Ideal as a supplement to a curriculum or for independent study. Designed for teachers, students, parents, homeschoolers, educators and more. The website has over 26,300 Pageviews and over 6,104 unique users annually.

ReadingBear.org: Learning to Read Resources
Reading Bear is a collection of free, well-made, multimedia phonics presentations. Your child can learn to read with Reading Bear. Reading Bear, a project of WatchKnowLearn.org, is the first free program online to teach beginning readers vocabulary and concepts while systematically introducing all the main phonetic patterns of written English, all using innovative rich media. We spent an enormous amount of time developing 50 presentations, covering even more phonics principles and illustrating over 1,200 vocabulary items. The website has over 105,396 Pageviews and over 6,495 unique users annually.

Resource Directory

The SMART Center  is now connected with  Amerigroup’s Social Needs Tool. The "Find my Help" website can help you identify family's needs and quickly get connected to community resources through the online directory facilitated by the SMART Center’s Warm Line Managers. Please see the links below: