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​​Character Education - Curriculum Overview (Grades K-4)

​​Character Education - Curriculum Overview (Grades K-4)
Lori Abe

Nurturing and guiding our children in their social, emotional, and spiritual growth is the basis of our Character Education program here at Mid-Pacific. Sharing care and respect for each individual, and using activities appropriate for each age group, we honor and encourage students to express their feelings, ideas, and questions. Our program utilizes aspects from other national social-emotional learning (SEL) programs, such as Tribes, and we refer to the guidelines published by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the first pioneers of SEL. We also discuss topics highlighted at our chapel. In addition, we refine our curriculum based on our students’ reflections and on personal, heartfelt issues they encounter at school and home. We want each student to know s/he is unique and special. We also want students to realize that others are unique and special as well, whether peers in their classroom, neighbors in our island community, or the almost 8 billion people who live across the globe. Our goal is to equip students as they grow in their intra- and inter-personal relationships, and our hope is that when facing conflict, our students will be able to utilize what they have learned to find peace for themselves and help others to find peace as well.


In kindergarten, we begin to identify and verbalize our various emotions, whether emotions such as anger, happiness, and disappointment, or bodily feelings such as fatigue, hunger, or pain. We learn that our emotions can physically affect our body and vice versa - that what we feel in our bodies can affect our emotions. Using photos, drawings, games, and songs with movement, we become familiar with people’s typical facial expressions and body posture when they are feeling a particular emotion; for example, a sad person may hunch his shoulders and frown, and an excited person may smile broadly and wave his arms. Students learn that even when facing the same situation, people may have different feelings in response, and all feelings are normal.

In kindergarten, we first focus on the emotion of happiness, growing in our self-awareness by touching upon the myriad of ways we find happiness, such as identifying people who love us, recognizing individual strengths, or even naming different songs and foods. We also try to consider another person’s perspective, speculating what makes our friends, teachers, and parents happy, and try to explain the reasoning behind our ideas. We also ponder what will make others in our greater community feel happy, whether a child in Hawaii who does not have a home, or a child who lives in another part of the world. We touch upon why practicing empathy is important, whether to strengthen friendships or to help others. These kind acts in turn may lend to helping ourselves to feel happier as well.

Right before Halloween, we discuss the emotion of fear. Each child brainstorms healthy strategies he uses to help himself feel better when afraid, whether at school or at home. Having a plan in place can also help a person feel more at peace. We also discuss ways we can help our friends to feel better if they feel afraid. Again, we want to grow in our self-awareness and self-management as well as in our social awareness and relationship skills — so we can find peace for ourselves and our community.

Throughout the semester, we discuss being aware of our community and ways we can help others, whether entering the CE House quietly so that the other occupants who share the CE House can continue to focus on their work, or writing letters with kind words and cheerful decorations to various people on our campus community or to an elderly care home in our Mānoa.


In first and second grade, regarding the development of relationship skills, students consider ways to be a kind friend. We discuss the importance of listening when a peer speaks, stopping when a friend asks us to stop (along with the reverse role of assertively telling another person to stop and seeking adult help if needed), taking turns, apologizing when needed, and noticing if a friend needs help and practicing what to say and taking action. We also practice these friendship skills in a variety of activities, such as interviewing and listening to a peer, engaging in cooperative activities to take turns using playdough, going out to the ball field to play games to practice stopping when a friend says to stop, or utilizing role plays to practice a kind tone of voice when addressing someone who feels nervous about his Halloween costume or respectfully standing up for ourselves if someone says something unkind to us. Children learn that our actions may affect our relationships, and healthy relationships can provide meaning, fulfillment, and happiness in our lives.

First and second graders also identify problems that they face in school. Children discuss how there may be multiple solutions to a problem, and defining whether a solution is “best” depends upon whether every person involved in the conflict feels reasonably at peace with it. We practice problem-solving skills because we will inevitably experience conflict in our lives, and we want to grow in our capability as peace-makers, trying to find peace for ourselves as well as for our community.

During the season of Thanksgiving, we read different story books and discuss choosing an attitude of thankfulness in the midst of potentially disappointing situations, or the perspective of a “glass half-full.” Research has shown that a thankful heart is a happy heart, both physically and emotionally. After all, life doesn’t always go as we hope, and we need to identify healthy strategies to manage our disappointment and to find peace for ourselves.

Throughout the semester, we discuss being aware of our community and ways we can help and be respectful of others, whether walking quietly past a classroom of sleeping preschoolers, drawing encouraging post-it notes to the high schoolers and walking to the other side of our campus to deliver them, or writing letters with kind words and creating cheerful decorations for an elderly care home in our Mānoa.


In third and fourth grade, students begin the year by doing activities such as Venn diagrams to get to know each other better and playing “Would You Rather” games, which support their cooperative classroom communities. In third and fourth grade, students continue to celebrate their own uniqueness as well as acknowledging the importance of honoring others’ differences. They practice respectful words to say when recognizing another person’s differences, whether a peer prefers the beach over the pool, or ice cream over cake, and recognize that friends can like different things and still remain friends. Seeing how humans will always inherently be different and inevitably disagree, we want to lay the groundwork for being able to respect another person while simultaneously disagreeing with them. In addition, especially as these students approach adolescence, where they may feel more self-conscious when standing out from the crowd and more inclined to blindly follow peers, we want to develop an inner dialogue of embracing one’s uniqueness.

Now that they are older elementary students, we begin to synthesize the self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, self-management, and responsible decision-making that they have learned over the years. To help establish a safe community, we investigate how we can better support a physically and emotionally safe environment at recess and in the classroom. Noting how arguments sometimes start during recess (as it does in schools around the world), we then launched into an exploration of winning and losing. We learned that even the best professional athletes must deal with losing more often than winning, and that losing doesn’t mean that one is a “loser.” Two healthy strategies we particularly focused on this semester were positive self-talk and growth mindset, powerful perspectives that help us to see how challenges, mistakes, and losses are opportunities to learn and grow. We also identify and share how we feel when we miss a goal, for example, and what we wish our peers would say to us. Then we empathize with our classmates and imagine how they would feel and practice honest yet kind words that we would say to them and which healthy coping strategies we would use if they miss a goal. Just in case someone does say unkind words to us, as unfortunately people may do in life, we continue to practice standing up for ourselves using respectful words, rather than striking back as a Snake or shrinking as a Snail. These images of Snake, Snail, and Healthy Self are from an anti-bullying curriculum students started in first and second grade.

Regulating our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations are obviously self-management lessons we work on all our lives, and ones that are so important for our individual health as well as its overflow to the relationships with others in our communities.

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