In the space below, write about a decision of yours that made you feel good about yourself. Describe the situation and explain why it made you feel good. Then, look at the list of words you selected and wrote on the previous page. Which words or descriptions are reflected in your decision?
Read each statement and decide if you agree or disagree with it. Then, drag it to the appropriate category.
While you may not think about it, your mind goes through a series of six steps, or questions, when you make a decision. These steps are listed below.
As children mature, their image becomes more important to them. They become more concerned with how they appear to others, and what they like in others. This is an exercise in helping students assess their own views about themselves.
When you introduce this exercise, you may want to choose a well-known celebrity and ask students to come up with adjectives to describe that celebrity. Remind students that although all adjectives are descriptive, they don’t all carry judgments. For instance, a celebrity could be labelled “cool” or “handsome,” but could also be described as “blue-eyed,” “brown-haired,” or “left-handed.
This activity contains 30 adjectives. Some are fairly neutral (short-haired, right-handed) and others are value-laden(athletic, stubborn). Share the digital activity link in the “Materials” section with your students. Ask them to select adjectives that best describe them and drag them into the “You!” category. You can also let them add other adjectives to the page.
Then, students should select adjectives they think friends would use to describe them and drag them to the “How You Think Your Friends Would Describe You” category. They may also add adjectives to the category. Explain to the students that these may or may not already be on the list of 30, and they may or may not be adjectives that they have used to describe themselves. What you want them to do is come up with the 10 most important characteristics their friends would choose to describe them.
Finally, in the “Write About It!” section, students should write a few sentences about a decision that made them feel good about themselves and why. For example, maybe they chose to join a team, help a friend with homework, or study for a big test.
Students may be sensitive to sharing the adjectives that they used to describe themselves. However, ask for volunteers to share some of the words on their list and highlight the positive words. Next, to conclude the lesson, have volunteers discuss the decisions that made them feel good about themselves. Encourage students to see how everyone is different and that we can be proud of different things.
Ask students what types of decisions they think they’ll be making in the next few months that will make them proud. End by telling them that you will be proud to see them make the decision to be tobacco and nicotine free.
Since the types of decisions students make change as they mature, this activity reviews the six steps outlined in the previous grades and has students evaluate three decisions they made recently so that they can assess their own decision-making style. (See the Overview Booklet for additional information about decision making that you can share with your students.) Students will also have the opportunity to make decisions about two hypothetical situations in a “Choices and Consequences” type of activity in the “You Decide!” section of the exercise. The “You Decide!” material is designed to be presented on an interactive whiteboard; alternately, students may complete this section in pairs or small groups.
Share the digital activity link with your students, and ask them to list complex decisions they have made. They should work independently to describe their decisions and answer the questions about the process they go through when making them. Ask students to stop after they answer the question, “How do you make decisions when you feel stressed?”
Ask for volunteers to share their process with the class. In the discussion, get them to talk about whether they went through all the steps involved, whether they focused on some steps more than others, what sorts of factors influenced their decisions, and how/if stress plays a role in decision making. Also ask them to describe how they felt about the decisions they ultimately made.
Let students know that it can be helpful to know how we make decisions so that we can make the right decisions for ourselves.
Present the “You Decide!” section of the activity on an interactive whiteboard, or have students complete it in pairs or groups. Tell students that in this case, if they make a poor decision, they’ll have the opportunity to go back to the beginning and start over—but that doesn’t always happen in real life.
If you present this section on a whiteboard, ask students questions about their choices and decisions as they make them. If students complete the exercise in pairs or groups, reconvene when they’ve finished to go over the students’ choices and decisions.
Encourage students to keep in mind the importance of evaluating options and consequences before they make a decision since they will have to deal with the results of their decisions—both the positive and the negative.
Use the supplemental “Surprise Chat” video to complement this activity.
