Topics for Parents and Professionals
Ometz school workshops are a powerful tool to help children and teens navigate their preschool, elementary and high school years. We also offer workshops for teachers, school personnel and parents. Professionals facilitate a variety of workshops with the goal of students and adults alike becoming more social, empathic, and safe.
Managing Challenging Behaviors
Global instability has increased the stress levels of children and youth of all ages, often resulting in behaviors that create problems in the classroom and at home. These workshops are tailored to help parents and staff work with children of all ages. These strategies can help manage behavior in a group or individual context and help teachers create a classroom environment of respect and understanding that benefits teachers and students alike.
Managing Stress and Anxiety
The workshop will teach an array of simple strategies to help participants manage their own stress and anxiety and will teach participants strategies to support children’s stress and anxiety.
The Importance of Play
Through play, young children engage and interact in the world around them. Later, play has a role in school success as it enhances children's confidence and resilience and their ability to interact positively with peers and adults. But today, time for free play has been greatly reduced in our classrooms and our homes. This workshop will review recent literature on the importance of play in children’s development and explore strategies for embedding “play” into our daily lives.
Self-Regulation in Children
There is a growing awareness that the better a child can self-regulate, the better they can rise to the challenge of mastering increasingly complex skills and concepts. In other words, the more a child can stay calmly focused and alert, the better they can integrate the diverse information coming in from their different senses, assimilate it, and sequence their thoughts and actions. This workshop will inform parents and/or teachers how to assist in the development of self-regulation skills in children.
Effective Communication
This workshop will provide effective communication strategies for interactions with children. Participants will leave this presentation with a variety of tools to better deliver and receive feedback, listen actively and express fears and concerns appropriately while leaving the lines of communication open.
Social media and Internet Safety
This workshop, for both parents and educators, provides valuable resources for keeping children safe online. Participants will come away with tools for identifying and reporting cyberbullying, an understanding of current online trends, apps and social media sites, strategies for encouraging responsible digital citizenship online and an understanding of the permanent traces and real-life consequences of children’s online actions.
The Unique Dimensions of Temperament
Temperament shapes children’s outcomes and influences the way they interact with their environment and how adults and children respond to them. Understanding a child’s temperament can help reframe how parents interpret children’s behaviour and the way parents think about the reasons for these behaviours. This workshop will look at the different dimensions of temperament and how they can be used to promote positive social and emotional development in children.
Raising a Resilient Child
Children need to grow up to be independent, self-reliant adults. The challenge is for the adults in their lives to appropriately nurture children’s self-esteem, enhance coping strategies for dealing with failure and disappointment, encourage motivation and foster strong decision-making techniques. This presentation offers parents and educators the opportunity to explore these methods of helping children gain the self-reliance needed for coping in our “hurried” world.
Homework 101
This presentation offers strategies to make homework a more pleasant experience for children and parents. Homework is presented to enhance self-reliance and foster motivation in children. The concept of “mindsets “will be explored as it impacts the ability for children to understand that through “effort” they can “grow” their intelligence.
A Parent's Role in Their Child's Friendships
Parents often wonder what they should do to ensure their children have good friends. Participants will learn practical strategies for identifying the boundaries of their involvement and how to teach their children to effectively navigate their social relationships. Issues related to exclusion, bullying, fostering healthy relationships and encouraging independence in conflict resolution and relationship maintenance will be examined.
Bullying... What You Need to Know
Whether a bully, a target or a witness, children are being confronted with this problem all too often. This workshop will help parents and educators understand bullying and why it happens, be able to recognize the signs of it in children’s behavior, and how to deal with it. Discussion will include how the brain influences the incidence of bullying and how positive self-esteem helps to mitigate its effect on children.
Risky Business... Protecting Your Kids
Part of the transition to adolescence is the search for identity, while at the same time trying to separate from parents and be a member of the peer community. Parents will have the opportunity to discover the “protective factors” which keep children from risk taking behaviours and learn how to use them in the everyday lives of their family.
Growing a Growth Mindset
Understanding intelligence and abilities as qualities we can develop has powerful ramifications on student motivation and learning, and school success. When teachers and parents focus on improvement rather than on whether a child is smart, children learn a lot more. Using the research of Dr. Carol Dweck, strategies to develop a “growth mindset” in children will be explored.