The CrisAlex program is a twelve week course taught on Sundays to help parents learn techniques to coach their children to speak clearly and confidently. The format of the class, for up to twenty parents, is a discussion format. CrisAlex facilitates the sessions and provides the materials for discussion. The last four weeks of the program are devoted to having the parents coach their child to present their personal "I Believe" speech. This is the second year of the CrisAlex program at SJPII.
Our youth are losing face to face communication skills in the era of smart phone technology, skills that research shows are critically important for long term education and career success. Children who speak clearly and confidently excel at all levels of education and job performance. Most public schools, especially those in the inner city, are unable to teach these skills due to budgetary and time constraints.
The CrisAlex program will help to solve this problem by engaging the parents and helping them to become effective 'coaches' for their children. By engaging the parents the learning experience will reside in the home where all the children in the family can benefit from the parents coaching. Research shows that parental involvement is highly 'impactful' in a child's education.
We believe that successful delivery of these programs will lead to rapid 'word of mouth' publicity and will draw the attention of educators and other non-profit organizations to start to offer similar programs.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
