Section 2: School-wide Professional Development

Cross-Curricular Activities
Awareness: The Key to Friendships

The program, Awareness: The Key to Friendships offers school districts the opportunity to help students without disabilities, as well as teachers and people in their community, better understand what it is like to live with a disability.
www.familyconnectionsc.org/programs/awareness_the_key_to_friendships/

Teen Trendsetters

Teen Trendsetters Reading Mentors is a free, award-winning program that recruits and trains high school students to mentor elementary students in reading. This one-on-one mentoring does more than help elementary students improve their reading skills—it also forges a rewarding relationship for the mentee and a lasting sense of achievement and responsibility for their teen mentors.

Select teens are thoroughly prepared for mentoring and are trained to work with BrainStorm™, a specialized 40-minute curriculum published by Scholastic. BrainStorm™ includes three topic areas, each with a 10-session, skill-based student magazine, a comprehensive tutor guide, and books that become part of the elementary student’s home library. Teen mentors meet with their mentee students once a week for a minimum of 20 weeks during the school year.

Sedgefield Intermediate School in Goose Creek, South Carolina, benefits from this program. Students from Goose Creek High School mentor students at the intermediate school each week. The first year of the program was highly successful, and the second year promises to be so as well. During the 2008-2009 school year, there were 118 Reading Mentors. It was the only Teen Trendsetter Reading Mentor group in the state of South Carolina and the largest one in the United States. Currently, there are 100 Mentors pairing up with a Sedgefield student to read each week. If you are interested in forming a program in your school, visit www.teentrendsetters.com/ for more information.