The objective of education is not to just develop academic and employability skills. Rather it is to teach children to think rationally and help them develop into productive and compassionate individuals who can act with integrity and, even in the most difficult times, do the right thing. The curriculum is important, but thinking and real life skills are equally important. The renowned educational researcher and teacher educator John Goodlad of the University of Washington says that we spend less than one percent of teaching time asking students to reason and think. We expect them to just regurgitate rather than reason and think.
The material in this book is designed to encourage children to reason and think so as to optimize the psychological impact. The objective is to prompt them to establish an emotional connect with the moral themes. It is a simple but an endearing and enduring approach since the themes are carefully selected to encourage children to reflect and arrive at their own conclusions. We hope this deceptively ordinary approach, where we facilitate children to think about moral values and guide them to develop their own beliefs, will go a long way to achieve extraordinary success in the domain of value education.
A primary objective of this book is to provide children an engaging and enriching experience in an attempt to inspire them to integrate and internalize the key moral values. It offers an effective and empowering package that has been carefully designed to help children develop their own value systems.
This book intends to creatively engage students in matters important to the future of humanity. The objective is to put learners first and present the messages from their perspective with the help of narratives describing every-day situations. The aim is to encourage children to process and analyze information from real-life situations and encourage them to become better thinkers in the process of internalizing values. This book contains thirty modules, and each module has three sections: a story session, upgrade yourself session and activity time.
The first section in each module includes a Story to enthuse children so as to creatively engage them in the process of inculcating values. All stories have embedded values, which automatically start working for the benefit of children even without their knowledge.
The second section is Take Charge to Upgrade Yourself. It is intended to encourage children to reflect on real-life situations affecting them and the society. This section attempts to instil in children a firm set of values, and in the process help them blossom into balanced human beings.
In this section, some questions and statements are given as Points to Ponder in order to creatively engage curious children. It is not necessary for readers to answer the questions. They are just expected to take a brief pause after every question or statement in an attempt to ponder over them. Sometimes, they may like to imagine a white angel and a red devil sitting on their each shoulder and debating between themselves. They should remember that the devil represents temptation and the angel represents conscience. A brief pause after every question or statement will allow their subconscious mind to absorb the desired value.
In the activity section, i.e. Appreciating ADD (an acronym for Advantages, Drawbacks and Dilemmas) Analysis, children are encouraged to analyze and synthesize the underlying moral messages so as to consolidate their learning about various values and life skills. This hands-on approach prods the students to arrive at their own conclusions so that learning has a lasting impact.
In the activity section, the process is more important than the final outcome. That is why it is important to engage the learners in the process, as opposed to focusing on a perfect answer and assuming that the achieving of this is what is required to instil a value. Since the activity section is expected to be independently done by the learners, it contains two sample illustrations with reference to two important themes, namely peer pressure and honesty in the appendix section as well as one example in the first module. In the appendix section, module wise objectives, index of value links and index of life skills are also given for easy reference.
The author has given special attention to enhance the psychological impact of the material. She has tried to keep it interesting and absorbing so that children can subconsciously internalize the desired values.