PLAY IS THE WAY® Enrichment Manual Volume 3
The Play Is The Way® Enrichment Manual (Volume 3), while offering children in-depth social and emotional learning, also offers educators the personal and professional development that can only enhance their capacity to act as the emotionally intelligent role models our children will always need.
The Enrichment Manual contains three further elements of Play Is The Way® that add greater depth and significance to behaviour education in primary schools.
- 3Rs Method - Reflection, Repair & Restitution
- Growing Personally & Socially (GPS)
- Ultimate Community Role Model (UCRM)
The 3Rs Method (Reflection, Repair & Restitution) is a behaviour education methodology that builds self-awareness and self-management skills for children having difficulty with their behaviour. It strengthens relationships, develops empathy, addresses bystander behaviour and makes a genuinely safe school achievable.
The 3Rs Method uses Guide Sheets that, with the guidance of a teacher, explicitly teach SEL skills, and gives students the opportunity to make the restitution that facilitates the repair of relationships.
Guided by the detailed notes in this manual, schools can effectively implement the 3Rs Method across all year levels and build a sustainable culture of support, safety and mutual respect.
A Growing Personally & Socially (GPS) conference is a carefully constructed, powerful form of "circle time" that allows the life and learning issues of a classroom to be addressed in a way that requires and improves the personal and social capabilities of both students and teachers. GPS offers direction in a time of need.
A GPS Conference does not exclude children from the circle. The circle is their community and their membership of that community is unbreakable. The message here is that your community will be here for you when you need them the most. You belong, and if your behaviour makes the relationship with your community difficult they will, to a person, help and support you to make things better.
GPS Conferences follow a set and well defined structure to ensure the safety of all participants and requires adherence to the demands of the Golden Rule: Treat others, as you would like them to treat you.
Ultimate Community Role Model (UCRM) is a long term, sustainable strategy for the development of empathetic young people of good character and decency. Importantly, UCRM builds and strengthens mutually respectful teacher/student relationships while developing the moral excellence that underpins academic achievement.
Broken into two parts, one for junior and one for upper primary, UCRM requires a student's "virtuous habits of behaviour" to be tracked from one year to the next. Receiving all 6 Community Role Model Certificates (CRM'S) is the bridge to possibly receiving the Ultimate Community Role Model Award.
CRM Certificates are attainable by all students (though not easily). However, the UCRM Award is only attainable in the final year of primary school and by one student only. A junior primary student can achieve the Ultimate Junior Community Role Model Award at the end of year 3.
The UCRM award is a deeply significant acknowledgement of a student's social and emotional capability and is equal in significance to the social aspirations of a community as the Dux Of The School award is to its academic aspirations.
We strongly recommend that the 3 elements in this Enrichment Manual should not be introduced to students until the first 3 elements of the Play Is The Way® methodology (Life Raft, PITW Games and PITW Self-Reflective Language) are embedded.