Assessment: Self-Awareness for Happiness

Open-ended prompts invite students to reflect on their current mood, describe who they want to become in three verbs, and name what makes them happiest, unhappiest, and most motivated.

Grades: Grades 3–6
File type: PDF
Preparation: Print ready

Updated Oct 19, 2023

Subject: Social Emotional Learning (SEL), Special Resources
Topic: Self-Awareness, Emotional Development
Resource types: Assessments, Teacher Tools
Preparation: Print ready

From the author

About this resource

Assessment: Self-Awareness for Happiness

The Assessment: Self-Awareness for Happiness is a straightforward, user-friendly tool. It guarantees a seamless integration into your teaching routine while pushing emotional growth in students.

Potential Users

Optimized for simplicity and reliability, this resource forms an excellent companion for third to sixth-grade educators.

Aims & Application

This two-page document focuses on social emotional learning along with promoting self-gauging of emotions. Using this improves not just students’ self-awareness but also gives teachers a mechanism to understand their own feelings better.

Versatile usage: The assessment can be carried out multiple times throughout the school year.
Incorporation: Serves effectively both as a group activity instrument allowing collective progress check or as homework that fosters reflection at home.

Add-Ons Included!

Beyond the self-awareness evaluation, page two includes a bonus – an encouraging poster labeled "Self Love is Your Super Power". This supplement urges positivity and can be employed as classroom decoration or inserted in individual student folders acting as an ever-present nudge towards appreciating oneself.

Ease of Usability

The availability of easy-to-print PDF format makes handling hard copies effortless be it by tech-savvy teachers or ones who prefer conventional teaching aids. Further enhancing its convenience factor!

In A Nutshell: Why Choose Assessment: Self-Awareness for Happiness?

Possessing both versatility and user-friendliness at its core, this tool cultivates happiness drawn from within among students and teachers alike, thus bearing true to Seligman's fundamental theory of self-generated happiness.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Practice naming and describing personal emotions and moods
Identify specific people, activities, and moments that influence happiness
Set a personal aspiration by choosing three descriptive verbs for a future self

Teaching tips

Use it as a beginning-of-week or beginning-of-month check-in, since the open prompts work well repeated over time to track how a student's answers change.
Pair it with a brief class discussion afterward so students can voluntarily share one answer, building group awareness of what motivates different people.
Keep completed sheets in a student folder as a private reflection record rather than displaying them, since some prompts (unhappiest moments) may be personal.

Skills covered

Emotional vocabulary — students describe their current mood and select three verbs to characterize an aspirational self
Self-reflection — prompts ask students to identify personal happiness and unhappiness triggers with specific examples
Goal articulation — the "person you want to become" prompt has students commit to concrete, self-chosen descriptors