BUZ Today Program (PP and Year 1)
SKILLS FOR COOPERATING AND RELATING WITH OTHERS
The Focus of the BUZ Today program is to introduce younger
children to some basics in social skills
Especially skills to understand, recognize and handle feelings, making and keeping friends, solving fights and handling things when others are not being friendly.
The BUZ Today program works best for a normal class group in a normal classroom setting.
The program is designed to be conducted over 8 x 1 hour sessions.
Each child receives a BUZ Today Booklet with worksheets.
BUZ Today - Program Outcomes
Provide the students with the skills to:
• Build a positive self image.
• Increase their friendship making abilities - knowing what friends ‘do’.
• Develop new friendships
• Identify feelings and recognise situations that may cause different feelings to emerge.
• Understand, communicate and manage feelings, especially anger and sadness.
• Appropriately express feelings and wants to others.
• Recognise and resolve conflict.
• Know what to do if someone is not being friendly or picking on them. (Bully-proofing)
• Grow and celebrate positivity.
BUZ TODAY PROGRAM SESSION OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN
SOCIAL CIRCLE SKILLS
• learn circle skills and learn how to cooperate with others in the BUZ circle.
SELF CONCEPT AND SELF RESPECT
• before they can truly be a friend to anyone else they have to be a friend to themselves.
• identify what they are good at or what they like about themselves (their strengths) and appreciate the strengths of others.
• become more aware of their own uniqueness and the uniqueness of others and continue to build a healthy self respect.
FRIENDSHIP SKILLS
• games that include everyone are more fun and making friends is important.
• demonstrate through storytelling the attributes of being a good friend.
• build friendship skills and recognise that to have a friend you have to be a friend.
• introduce the idea that it is important to do things ‘together’ as friends.
EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE
• experience excitement and fun and begin to build a vocabulary of feelings.
• identify the feeling of being happy, explore what it means to have desirable feelings.
• identify sad characteristics and reflect on what can cause sadness.
• understand that feeling sad is OK and there are things they can do to feel better.
• identify other feelings they don’t like including fear and worry.
• establish for themselves what ‘bad’ feelings are and what causes them as well as enhance their skills to handle these feelings.
• identify what negative feelings feel and look like in themselves and others and continue to build on the emotional vocabulary and competence.
• enable children to individually reflect on the feelings that they don’t like (Sad and Bad).
ANGER MANAGEMENT
• identify the facial expressions and body language that are expressed in anger.
• realise that their anger can build up and explode like a cola bottle if it is not handled correctly.
• learn how to handle their feelings in a positive way.
• recognise that it is OK to get angry but there are effective ways of handling the anger without hurting anyone.
• Learn and practice the ‘BUZ Feelings Management Creed’.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
• experience what can cause fights. Children identify how fights begin.
• friendships are too important to break up because of a conflict, fight or disagreement and that there are ways to sort things out.
• learn and apply the BUZ Hopscotch Method of Conflict resolution to solve fights.
• a fight is really a ‘problem’ that can be fixed.
• the importance of saying sorry in the restoring of friendships and the power of forgiveness.
BULLY-PROOFING
• begin to get an understanding of the difference between conflict and bullying and think about some ideas for when someone is not being friendly.
• learn an effective ways of walking away from and talking to someone who is constantly not treating them properly.