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.

Year groups: Years 4–7
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