Social & Emotional Climate
Owning Up Curriculum
The Creative Arts Magnet Program supports the use of the "Owning Up" curriculum.
The following is quoted from the program materials:
“Until recently, bullying was thought of as a bigger boy, often with low self-esteem and low social status, physically picking on a smaller boy. But this definition of bullying ignores its root causes. In contrast, we believe that the root causes of bullying are founded on how people, children and adults alike, define who has power, privilege, and respect in our culture.
One of the primary ways people define who has power and respect is how our culture defines masculinity and femininity. Within this context, girls and boys form relationships and alliances with their peers that are both a source of support and conflict. This in turn helps to create a complex social hierarchy that can dictate people’s roles as perpetrators, bystanders, and/or targets for bullying.
Owning Up, a curriculum by Rosalind Wiseman, teaches boys and girls to analyze this dynamic and understand how it manifests itself in their everyday experience of cliques, popularity, bullying, gossip, crushes, and other relationships. More info: rosalindwiseman.com/html/owning_up.htm
Skills for Life:
Additionally, some students in Skills for Life, a curriculum is based on the five main emotional competency areas:
- Emotional self-awareness: recognizing, naming, and understanding the cause of one's feelings. For example, a child being able to not only identify feeling "bad" but angry, hurt, jealous, upset, sad, or scared in various life situations.
- Handling emotions appropriately: demonstrating productive options for managing stress and upsetting feelings rather than "acting-out" negatively
- Self-motivation: thinking, planning, and solving problems by using impulse control, and delayed gratification to reach a specific goal (e.g.: no TV until homework is completed); and maintaining hope and optimism, trying again despite setbacks (e.g.: a poor grade on a test leads to studying more, not less).
- Empathy: recognizing and understanding emotions in others. If one child is able to care about how another is feeling, teasing or picking fights can be drastically reduced.
- Social Skills: handling emotions in relationships and interacting harmoniously with others, including being sensitive to others needs and wants, and developing what is considered good "people skills".
Many studies have shown that IQ and SAT scores do not predict who will be successful in life (IQ at best contributes about 20 percent). Even school success has been predicted more by emotional and social measures (e.g.: being self-assured and interested, following directions, turning to teachers for help, and expressing needs while getting along with other children) than by academic ability.
-Kathleen Van der Horst- a parent
Community Service:
