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Empathy is a key ingredient in the development of prosocial behaviors and interpersonal problem-solving skills. It is necessary for social-emotional competence and contributes to academic success. Being able to identify, understand, and respond in a caring way to how someone is feeling provides the foundation for helpful and socially responsible behaviors, friendships, cooperation, coping, and conflict resolution, all of which help children succeed in school.

There are two main goals for this unit: to develop students' ability to have empathy for others and express compassion, and to build students' skills for succeeding in school.

In earlier grades, the CLISE program explicitly teaches skills for learning to ensure that students develop the foundational self-regulation skills necessary for successful participation in learning.

In Grades 4 and 5, the CLISE curriculum reinforces students' skills for learning by implicitly interweaving their use into all the lessons. Two important skills for teaming—listening with attention and being assertive—are used in this unit to help develop students' ability to succeed in school, get along with others, and make and keep friends.

To achieve these goals, students in fourth grade learn to:

1. Identify and understand their own and others' feelings by

• Focusing their attention on verbal, physical, and situational clues

• Understanding that people can have multiple feelings at the same time

2. Take others' perspectives by:

• Recognizing that people may have similar or different feelings from their own

• Understanding that different people may have different perspectives about other people, places, and situations

3. Show compassion for others by: showing that they have empathy for others.

4. Succeed in school by:

• Listening with attention

• Being assertive

5. Make and keep friends by:

• Being respectful to others

• Learning how to make conversation

• Learning how to join in a group

🔎 See more: Unit 1 - Grade 4

It's extremely important to teach students about reporting sexual abuse. Participation in a sexual abuse prevention program increases disclosure rates among students, so teaching children assertiveness and reporting skills is critical. It's also important for students to know they can seek help if they are being abused and to continue telling people until they get help. Some students may be afraid to talk about their abuse because they have been told by their abuser(s) to keep it secret. This kind of secrecy allows the abuse to continue. Therefore it's critical to teach students not to keep secrets about abuse.

The goal of the Child Protection Unit is to develop students' ability to recognize, report, and refuse unsafe or sexually abusive situations. To achieve this goal, fourth-grade students learn to:

1. Keep themselves safe by:

• Recognizing potentially unsafe situations

• Identifying unsafe and unwanted touches
• Following the Always Ask First Rule: Always ask a parent or the person in charge first before going somewhere, doing something, or accepting something from someone
• Remembering the Private Body Parts Rule
• Following the Private Body Parts Rule: Private body parts are private. No one should ever:

2. Respond to unsafe situations by using the Ways to Stay Safe:

• Recognize: Is it safe?

• Report: Tell an adult.

• Refuse: Say words that mean no.

3. Apply the Ways to Stay Safe to situations involving sexually abusive touching

🔎 See more: Unit 3 - Grade 4

The goal of this unit is to develop students' ability to manage their own strong feelings before feelings escalate and result in negative consequences.

To achieve this goal, students in fourth grade learn to:

1. Recognize how strong feelings affect their brains and bodies by:

• Focusing attention on their bodies for clues about how they're feeling

• Understanding that when they feel strong feelings, the feeling part of their brain, the amygdala, reacts, making it hard to think clearly

• Recognizing that thinking about their feelings helps the thinking part of their brain, the cortex, start to get back in control

2. Calm down, using the Calming-Down Steps:

• Stop-use your signal

• Name your feeling

• Calm down:

• Breaking down a big task into smaller, more manageable parts Using the Good Plan Checklist

4. Use the Problem-Solving Steps to solve typical fourth-grade problems, such as:

• Sharing a limited resource, such as a computer

• Making amends for damaging an item

• Encountering conflicts on the playground
• Provoking hurt feelings
• Resisting negative peer pressure

🔎 See more: Unit 5 - Grade 4