Second Grade Guidance Curriculum

Lessons on Teasing/Bullying

We have recently finished teaching our bullying prevention curriculum in the second grade classrooms. The following is a brief highlight of each lesson:

    Lesson one consists of playing tic-tac-toe to review various concepts and terms such as: upstander/bystander. Double D Rule, and the Solution Wheel and how to use them, among others. The whole class is a team and either Mrs. MacKinnon or myself are our own team.
     In lesson two the students watch a video of a few vignettes and discuss the solutions they used from the solution wheel.
     During lesson three, we read the book "Nobody Knew What to Do" by Becky Ray McCain and Todd Leonardo. The concepts covered are upstanders/bystanders, bullying and it's definitions, as well as what to do if they or someone else is being bullied.

CAPS

We are currently starting to teach our CAPS program, an eight-week curriculum that teaches conflict resolution. CAPS stands for the four steps needed to solve a problem:
C - cool down
A - agree to solve the problem
P - point of view
S - win-win solutions
During these lessons, various strategies/tools and concepts are taught, including I-feel messages, feelings vocabulary, and reading emotions in body language, among others. The strategies and concepts that are taught in this curriculum can be used in CAPS. For example, the "I-feel" tool can be used during the third step "Point of View".

In November, our goal is to increase the students' feelings vocabulary beyond mad, sad, angry, and excited. Such feelings listed by our students include: disappointed, enraged, annoyed, jealous, frustrated and joyful. In this lesson, we also introduce the Zones of Regulation curriculum by Leah Kuypers. This curriculum assists our students in understanding how the emotions we feel affect the amount of energy we experience. These lessons are a precursor to learning about I-feel messages. As adults, we understand that there is a difference between mad and furious. However, some of our young students do not always understand the difference.
An explanation of the Zones curriculum can be found in our post from November 2016. These concepts will be especially important later in our lessons as we discuss tools they can use to assist them in calming down (the first and most important step in CAPS).
   As the students continue with this curriculum, they will learn about the Conflict Escalator and how to effectively "step off" the escalator in order to calmly and peacefully resolve their conflicts.
A full explanation of our CAPS program can be found in our 2 posts from January 2017.


Additional Resources:

Books:

Nobody Knew What to Do by Becky Ray McCain and Todd Leonardo. In this story, a young boy finds the courage to stand up to the bullying he sees happening at his school.

The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. This book is a great way to introduce emotional vocabulary. The pictures also depict the body language each feeling imparts.

Activities:

Feelings charades--without using words, guess what people are feeling using only body language.

Role plays-- role playing is great way to practice using strategies. Examples of role plays: how to create and use I-Feel messages, how to be an upstander, using the Solution Wheel.