Youth Groups

Effective character education to build strong social skills

The Good Choices Program is rapidly becoming popular with youth group leaders all over Southern California. Recent sponsors include several chapters of the Police Activities League Supporters as well as Boys and Girls Clubs. It is easy to customize the program to fit any age of children from 6 to 13 years old, and it is also designed so that you can use it to address the values and social skills your children are having the most difficulty with.

Our program is built around a booklet: How to Make Good Choices. This booklet is designed and written for children to teach them common sense guidelines to a happy life. It contains 21 chapters, each covering a specific tool to help children evaluate situations and make good decisions that will improve life for themselves and others.

Creating an age-appropriate lesson plan to address the needs of your class

The Good Choices Program is designed so that you can customize the program to address the social skills your students need most. Teachers have reported tremendous improvement in student behavior and have used the program to deal with classroom and social situations including bullying, lying, cheating, stealing and a general lack of respect for teachers and fellow students.

The program comes with a workbook for teachers to use as a guideline. This workbook will take you and your class through all 21 chapters of the book How to Make Good Choices. It incorporates the audio-visual presentations as well as recommended activities to get the students involved and engage their understanding and participation.

The lessons for each chapter are easy to tailor for any age, as the students are the ones giving examples and coming up with the real-life situations to be portrayed in activities and skits. And in case you need more than just the one lesson to get a specific point across, our member section includes additional lesson plans, games and activities to fit various age groups.

The Good Choices Tool Kit

Dozens of pilot programs with hundreds of children of all ages have shown How to Make Good Choices and its companion workbook to be highly effective in getting children to make their OWN good choices.

The program is now available in an easy-to-use kit that has everything you need to start delivering the program right away. The kit contains:

• Six copies of the How to Make Good Choices Booklet
• The Good Choices Lesson Plan workbook
• A copy of The Way to Happiness Booklet
• A copy of The Way to Happiness DVD with public service video presentations of the 21 moral guidelines covered in the booklet.

How the Good Choices Program is delivered

The Good Choices Tool Kit comes with a Lesson Plan workbook designed to provide a simple guide for the teacher or group leader who is delivering the program.

The teacher or group leader selects a lesson plan to address a particular chapter and starts by playing the students a short video that illustrates that chapter, such as “Set a Good Example”. The students then discuss what they have just seen and how it applies to them.

After the video, the children can read the applicable chapter from the book How to Make Good Choices or a parent or teacher can read it to them, making sure they understand all the words used.

This is followed by practical exercises that get the students to participate in examining different real-life situations where that principle would come into play.

At no time are the students told what they must or must not do – they are helped instead to examine the consequences of their decisions in life so that they can make their own good choices.