Be Exceptional

Exceptional Kid Academy is  dedicated to developing Social Emotional Wellness and preparing youth for the one-day transition into adulthood and the workforce.

Many students need to realize that their K-12 education is preparing them for life as adults. Many start to think about the transition just a few months before graduation. Poor transition planning and a failure to consistently focus on social-emotional development leave students ill-prepared for such a vital transition and all the little transitions that happen along the journey. Students need help finding the strategies to overcome common barriers that life presents for everyone. 

Through repeated, consistent, and explicit discussion and attention to self-awareness and social-emotional wellness embedded into the subject of transition planning, Exceptional Kid Academy helps students increase their self-awareness of personal preferences, interests, needs, and strengths (PINS) and plan purposefully for their futures and the barriers 

that await them, waiting to be broken down. 

Our products and services offer children opportunities to investigate their social-emotional development and PINS and how they change and evolve. They engage in the exploration process of career possibilities and make deliberate choices for their lives. They challenge negative thoughts and overwhelm them with the positive; they uncover and unlock their limitless potential!

Exceptional Kid Academy was born from a multi-decade-long public education servant in an education system burdened with excessive normed referenced assessments, too much content to teach, insufficient time, unpredictable swings of government administrations leaving social-emotional wellness and planning for change an afterthought despite the mental health and financial challenges for many people worldwide. 

Many educational publishing companies develop and market products that fail to address the issues that are the actual causes of the problems. They create colorful tools with fancy digital components with little substance, requiring too much preparation for teachers who don’t have enough time to implement with fidelity. Most lack some of the most crucial elements, enough time for teachers and students to share thinking, reflect on thinking, and make purposeful choices.

Programs teach concepts like happiness, empathy, mindfulness, self-awareness, but they don’t address what impacts students inabilities to exude these traits. Things like: fear, anxiety, lack of belief in oneself, lack of confidence, inability to persevere, inability to think critically, inability to choose the high road, inability to recognize cognitive distortions and biases, inability 

to make action plans, prioritize and overcome life’s real obstacles. 

Exceptional Kid Academy workbooks inspire teachers to facilitate conversations, practice, and reflection of these very skills and what students can do to improve them. From their Kindergarten year until they graduate, students progress through the K-12 journey using Making or Molding the Future Me, a K-12 program, to learn, practice and reflect on topics that they talk about 

all year every year until they transition into adulthood.