The programme
The Wolf’s Tricks
The book is the story. This is the teaching layer around it — six named behaviours, three short sessions, and one vocabulary that a child hears the same way at school and at home.
Status: the classroom materials are a draft, in expert review
They have not completed child-development, child-sexual-abuse-prevention, survivor-informed, legal or institutional safeguarding review, and they are not approved for classroom delivery. They are published anyway, marked as drafts, so the people who would have to deliver them can tell us what is wrong first.
The family-facing materials are finished and free to use today.
Why the programme has a name of its own
Children remember characters, not curricula. “Watch out for the Wolf’s tricks” is a sentence a five-year-old can hold, repeat, and apply to a situation the book never described. That is the entire mechanism.
It is also a name adults can use without having to say anything clinical in front of a child.
The six tricks
Each one is a behaviour. None of them is a kind of person. A child is never asked to work out whether somebody is good or bad — only to notice what is being done.
| Trick | What it means to a child |
|---|---|
| The Question Trick | Somebody asks for information you do not need to give. |
| The Come-With-Me Trick | Somebody tries to change where you are going. |
| The Polite Trick | Somebody calls you rude for keeping a boundary. |
| The Secret Trick | Somebody wants touching, pictures, threats or worrying behaviour kept secret. |
| The Disguise Trick | Somebody you know and like can still do something that is not okay. |
| The Come-Closer Trick | Somebody keeps asking for more closeness than you want. |
And one that is not a trick at all
Frozen Feet. Sometimes your body goes still and will not move. That happens to grown-ups too. It is never your fault, and it does not mean you did anything wrong.
This card exists because every programme of this kind risks teaching children that getting away is the test. It is not, and the materials say so repeatedly.
The shared vocabulary
The point of a programme rather than a book is that the same six words arrive from more than one direction.
- Children
- NOTICE what somebody does. GO, if you safely can. TELL — and keep telling until somebody helps.
- Grown-ups
- LISTEN to their own words. BELIEVE them first. PROTECT — because it is our job, never theirs.
- Institutions
- PREPARE staff before delivery. RESPOND under policy and law. REVIEW what actually happened.
Where to go next
- For educatorsThree sessions, learning outcomes, the cards, what not to teach, and what to do if a child discloses. Draft — not for classroom delivery.
- For boards, schools and administratorsOntario’s annual requirement under Erin’s Law, where the Kindergarten gap sits, and what we are and are not claiming.
- For familiesThe home version. Five rules, two kinds of secret, and what to say. Finished and free.
- The family sheetOne printable page you can use today.
- How this could go wrongOur own harm assessment, published in full.
A note on the name
“The Wolf’s Tricks” is the name of the programme, and it lives here, inside the book’s world. The book is called Little Red Comes Home, and that is the name of the initiative as a whole.
The distinction is deliberate. A list of manipulation tactics makes sense as a teaching device inside a children’s story. It is the wrong thing to put on the front door.