Moral Education: Learning to Cooperate

Here is an introduction to lessons at CGK Afterschool.

CGK's eight-week-long project works will be based on the main “Driving Question”.

Here are the Driving Questions for this "Moral" lesson.

"How can we build social cooperation skills?”

The lesson theme was "Cooperation."

We followed this theme and question with fun lessons each week that drew the student's interest.

Here are the comments of Mr. Bobby, the teacher who was in charge of the lessons.

Week 1

With the song of the next two month being “Remember Me” from the movie Coco, the students watched the movie and thought of questions to ask Ms. Alexia about Spanish culture and about the movie. The students created a see/think/wonder chart for their questions.

Week 2

The students spoke with and had a mini Spanish lesson with Ms. Alexia. They asked her questions about the movie they watched and learned about elementary schools in America. After the interview, Ms. Alexia taught them how to sing the Spanish lyrics to the song “Remember Me”

Week 3

The students learned about friendship and how to make friends. Students created a friendship crown and shared what they think it means to be a good friend. During the presentation time students shared they crowns they made, and for their exit ticket about friendship.

Week 4

Students read the book “Peanut Butter and Cupcake”. Students discussed how peanut butter made new friends. Students wrote about how they can make new friends and how they can keep the friends they make.

Week 5

The students read the story “Duck & Goose”. After reading the book about cooperation, the students wrote about what they learned about from Duck and Goose about cooperation. Using what we learned about friendship as a scaffold.

Week 6

Today the kids played cooperation based games and challenges. The kids played three games about cooperation. The first being a human knot. Students made groups, held hands with opposite people then had to figure their way to make a circle. The second game was, as a group keep a balloon in the air using just their hands. The last game was a maze type game that the class had to navigate through. The exit ticket for the day was writing about how they can use cooperation.

Week 7, 8

The students got into groups and discussed how they will make their poster about cooperation. The groups created works of art displaying cooperation an friendship building skills. The groups presented their final posters.

Moral lessons are a very abstract but important concept as a global skill, and it is also a part of what we want children to value as a human being.

In this project activity, the students were able to learn about "cooperation" through hands-on experience as they felt and thought about the balance between asserting one's own opinion and accepting the other's opinion.

We hope that this lesson will help the students to think about "cooperation" and "consideration for others" in the future.