16 Week Pre-K to 3rd Grade Emotional Resilience Course
Teaching children emotional resilience can be fun. Children will not immediately understand the principles and actions you are teaching. Also remember that you are giving them information and actions that may or may not be incorporated into their behaviors immediately. However, you are giving them a foundation and tools for self-soothing as they are leaving their parents. These tools should make your day better. For this reason, we suggest doing this half-hour lesson early in your workday with the children.
We break emotional resilience for young children into 4 major categories, Levels of consciousness, levels of motivation, spheres of influence, and role identity. The foundation is the Levels of Consciousness, which will be the focus of the first 5 weeks of class. All other lessons build from the Levels of Consciousness. We will also introduce action tools that children can learn to aid them in their interactions with their own thoughts and feelings as well as with those around them.
Lessons are divided into 4 parts. Each day the lesson will open with a 5-minute singing time, move into a 10–15-minute lesson time, a 5-minute reading time, and close with a 5-minute singing time. It is important that this structure in the lessons remain the same as consistency will aid the child’s ability to learn and use the information you are teaching and will prevent undue anxiety about unpredictable lesson progression.
Each lesson has a series of questions to ask the children during the 10-15 minutes of lesson time. This is an interactive period. However, when reading suggested books, you should not ask the children any questions. The 5 minutes dedicated to reading is for internal processing, and you should not attempt to help the children process the readings openly. It can be tempting sometimes to feel that we need to make sure the child understands what we want them to get from the readings, but we don’t have an agenda for learning from the readings. This is a period for the child to discover themselves. You have already primed the child’s mind for internal processing through music and lesson time. Leave the children alone and let them wrestle internally with the readings.
You are provided with the songs to be sung in class. These songs were written specifically for this course and will teach the children important regulatory skills. Swapping these songs out for other songs will prove less effective for children’s learning and progression.
The lesson time consists of very brief informational instructions, comic book readings with discussions and role plays with the characters from the comic book. You are provided with the comic pages to read for each lesson and class. We make available plushies (stuffed animals) of each of the six main characters and some of the side characters in the comics for purchase. You may use random stuffed animals, but you will lose some of the consistency of having the same characters for the children to interact with.
This manual will also provide you with suggested readings for each class. We do not provide the books, though we will suggest books that are generally available in school libraries, local libraries, and/or easily purchased.