Extension Activities
Responsible Decision Making | Grades K-3
Learning Goal 1: Considers ethical standards, social and community norms and safety concerns in making decisions.
Go back: Core Ed.
Go back: Intervention Ed.
Benchmark 1: Identify and follow shared bus, classroom and school norms.
Take it further — integrate!
As a class, develop simple, positively stated rules. Create a visual reminder for students, e.g., walk don’t run in the hall; raise your hand to speak; one person speaks at a time. Post the rules in high-traffic areas in school.
Benchmark 2: Identify and illustrate safe and unsafe behaviors.
Take it further — integrate!
Teach “safe” and “unsafe” as vocabulary words. Ask students to work together as a class to decide if a list of behaviors are “safe” or “unsafe” (e.g., riding on a bike path while wearing a helmet; riding in a car without wearing a seatbelt; walking close to the edge of a cliff; crossing the street at a crosswalk while holding an adult’s hand).
Benchmark 3: Understand that decisions can have positive and negative effects on themselves and others.
What Do You Do With a Chance? (Buy)
Take it further — integrate!
Play a game of night at the museum, where students pretend to be statues in a museum. They don’t want to be “caught” moving by the janitor’s flashlight. Debrief with questions regarding decisions made by players so they were not “caught.”
Use story time to discuss how characters made decisions, and how their decisions effected themselves and others.
In social studies, read biographies of leaders, and discuss their decisions and the effects of the decisions on others.