Welcome to FireWorks, the online non-credit course that examines anger management with a special emphasis on adult-child relationships. This course is integrated into The WonderWise Parent, a web site for parents and teachers.

There is no cost for taking this course and formal enrollment is unnecessary. FireWorks is brought to you by Kansas State Research and Extension at Kansas State University. Versions of this course for CEUs from a variety of professional organizations and both undergraduate and graduate credit are under development. We will post a notice on this page when these versions go online.

My name is Chuck Smith. I am a professor and extension specialist at Kansas State University in the School of Family Studies and Human Services. I have 30 years of experience as an early childhood teacher and parent educator.

The course is called FireWorks because anger is similar in some ways to fire. Fire works when properly contained. Plus, the feeling of anger can sometimes feel like internal fireworks going off.

This course is organized around ten "lessons." Each lesson is composed of several conversational "frames." (There are more than 150 frames in the course.) As you proceed from frame to frame, you and I will have a conversation. You will have the opportunity to react to my ideas and occasionally find ideas for homework. You can bounce around from any lesson to another, but the best way to take the course is read everything in sequence. You might also be interested in taking a look at the course evaluations.

At different points in the course you will see the following STOP sign.

This is a suggested time for you to stop, bookmark the page, and return later to begin again more refreshed. Of course, you can decide to stop and bookmark at any point you want. Trying to move through this entire course at one sitting is not recommended.

Before continuing, consider printing the Bibliography and visiting your local library to review some of the references that were used in preparing FireWorks.

To continue, click on the Introduction link in the left column or the Next pepper below.