Help us celebrate! May 2024 is our one-year anniversary of becoming BELONG Partners!

  • Instilling joy and contentment

    When we ask educators what they hope for in their students when they enter adulthood, they usually respond with a long list of life skills which include a sense of connection, peace, and contentment. Even though you have huge responsibility for teaching academic subjects, as educators you also value the human being doing the learning. […]

  • Planting Seeds of Contentment

    What helps a child grow into a happy, content adult? Happiness is the result of strong social emotional health that is built up over time. It starts with meeting your child’s need to be soothed as an infant, helping them manage “big” feelings and by modeling and supporting a sense of hope and optimism as […]

  • Teaching Tenaciousness

    Every teacher has some students who seem eager to lean into challenges or take on new things – and other students who do the opposite. They seem pull away from taking risks and struggle to manage the frustrating feelings that naturally arise when learning new ideas or tasks. Growing the internal capacity to “lean into […]

  • Stubbornness is Perseverance in Disguise

    Can you remember a time your child insisted on continue to build something, or play or read – when you needed to go somewhere? Perseverance can be frustrating and inconvenient! When your child is sticking to something they want to do – even though you want/need to do something else it is challenging. Yet, the […]

  • Talking and Teaching about Truth

    In the milieu in which our children live – social media, the internet, television and movies – it is often hard to sort fact from fiction. Our children get mixed messages about honesty. While they are told it is an important value, they are surrounded by messaging that implies you can say anything you want, […]

  • Fact and Fiction for the Growing Brain

    Children experience the world through a different lens than adults and are learning to tell the difference between what is “real” in their imagination, and what is real in the world. Often children lie for very similar reasons as adults – they feel trapped, are afraid of being punished or rejected, or sometimes just because […]

  • Fostering Friendships

    Friendships are important for your children…and they can be complicated! As human being we need to know that we belong and that we matter. One of the important ways we do that is through our relationships with our peers. Of course as a parent, you want your child to have lots of good friends and […]

  • Finding Friends at School

    Friends make difference. Having a friend means you are not alone, that someone sees you and someone cares about you. Friendships help students know that they matter. For human beings that sense of being cared for and seen is critical for our sense of well-being. What we now know is that without that sense, our […]

  • Raising Reliable Kids

    There are many joys that come with having children in your family. They bring play, surprises and often teach us new ways to look at the world. And even though there are days that you wish your young children were predictable and reliable, it is not a skill built in at birth. As children grow […]

  • Growing Trust and Dependability

    Trust is a critical part of creating a safe classroom community and a large portion of that trust is built on the sense that the teacher is dependable and reliable. You want your students to be dependable as well: people who others can count on for their truthfulness and integrity. Teaching behaviors like this is […]