Business Fortune
Broadly speaking, social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to the process through which individuals learn and apply a set of social, emotional, and related skills, attitudes, behaviors, and values that help direct students. This includes thoughts, feelings, and actions in ways that enable them to succeed in school. The following descriptions of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) are from CASEL. They address five broad, interrelated areas of competence and provide examples for each: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Well-implemented SEL programs positively affect students' success in school. Studies show that social-emotional skills—such as problem-solving, self-regulation, impulse control, and empathy—help improve academics, reduce negative social behaviors like bullying, and create positive classroom climates.
Peekapak’s team is passionate about the education space and is committed to helping children become successful, compassionate, caring, and empathetic citizens of the world. At Peekapak, the people are committed to helping children become successful, compassionate, caring, and empathetic citizens of the world. By teaching children important social-emotional learning (SEL) skills so that topics like gratitude, perseverance, and respect become not just something they hear about, but a part of who they are. Peekapak strives to accomplish this by creating a company and a curriculum that makes SEL fun, easy and seamless for teachers, parents and especially children, so that kids learn without even realizing it.
Best SEL solutions that Peekapak provides
Administrators: Empower teachers, engage students and connect parents, while collecting insights on the client’s SEL initiative.
Easy Implementation: District wide SEL implementation is critical, with resources that use the power of relatable characters and captivating storytelling to engage students.
Holistic Supports: Peekapak provides tools to continually help build a strong community and SEL centered culture throughout the client’s district. Promote family engagement in students learning through at-home activities and family well-being nights.
Promotes Diversity and Inclusion: At Peekapak’s core, Peekapak strives to build a more equitable and inclusive world that embraces the diversity and uniqueness of each citizen. The characters in Peekapak’s (Prek-5) content as well as the real-life stories in Peekapak’s secondary (6-12) resources deliberately represent different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, skills, interests, and temperaments.
Build Literacy Skills: Peekapak is not another thing on teachers’ plates; it’s ELA standards-aligned and is fully integrated. Peekapak’s leveled readers and fully-planned learning activities help students develop empathy, self-regulation and more while also building reading and writing skills.
Solve Fun Problems: Through Peekapak’s stories, lessons, family activities and learning games, students learn SEL skills by solving problems. In myPeekaville, Peekapak’s learning game, students experience SEL concepts in the context of an interactive story, while developing a shared language.
Reinforce SEL Skills: myPeekaville uses beautiful visuals to bring learning to life. It incorporates literacy-based learning, and game-based learning to engage students and reinforce what they've learned during class time, which are evidence-based materials and literacy and game-based learning tools.
Engage Learners: In myPeekaville, students (and teachers) gain agency by creating personalized avatars, and customizing their experience in an immersive open world. Users solve problems related to their current SEL unit such as solve problems, complete quests, and improve reading and writing skills.
In-Depth Analytics: Teachers receive access to various analytical insights into student activity and progress in myPeekaville. In myPeekaville students check-in daily by selecting how they’re feeling, providing teachers with a heatmap of student sentiment data including viewing progress, tracking students, and seeing sentiment data.
Guided Stories: Students can actively practice their reading, writing and vocabulary skills while playing. The students can also read as the stories available at any time, could complete challenges and enjoy at student’s leisure.
Support All Readers: With engaging stories available at five guided reading levels in English and two levels in Spanish, Peekapak’s leveled readers help the client differentiate learning across all elementary learners. The 10 SEL themes are available digitally and in print book sets.
District & School Dashboards: Stay in the know with student dashboards, curriculum progression and parent engagement reports as a way to provide insights for proactive strategies and intervention when needed.
Pre K - 12 Curriculums:
- Defined & flexible scope and sequence
- Engaging student learning platforms
- Turnkey teacher-led lesson plans and activities
- Parent Engagement updates and activities
- Flexible in-person or online learning tools
- Spanish Resources
Professional Development: The 1 hour sessions include interactive professional learning to assist educators in gaining a deeper understanding of social-emotional learning and how it applies to the client’s life. The team further looks at the connection of SEL to individuals, families, and communities surrounding the client and the client’s classroom.
Meet the leader behind the success of Peekapak
Ami Shah, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Ami is an experienced Marketing Director, starting her professional experience at Procter & Gamble. Ami has taught in K-4 classrooms and has worked with social enterprise organizations across Vietnam, India and Canada. Ami has a MBA from INSEAD and a BBA from WLU.
