How Can Pre-K Students Take Care of Their 8 Personal Resources

Desires, simple or grand, move individuals to take action, exert effort, and manage themselves. For pre-kindergartners, desires can be wanting to play with certain toys or sports, make friends, or be good at something. Achieving these desires is not as easy as wanting them. It requires effort, discipline, and proper management of one’s personal resources.

Complete with a short story, a gift box, and a puppet play, this lesson introduces the eight personal resources to pre-kindergartners. These resources are everyone’s gifts, and in this lesson, the students learn what these are and how to use them wisely.

An interesting and educational story titled "The Boy Who Had Everything" opens this lesson. It is about a boy named Paddy who is having difficulty realizing that he already has everything he wishes for. What are his wishes? Hint: the pre-kindergartners receive these in this unit. That’s right! It’s the Eight Gifts! As the pre-kindergartners follow Paddy’s story through the end, they learn something very important: they all have these eight special gifts! These are their personal resources, which they have to learn how to manage.

To help pre-kindergartners understand the lesson concepts better, a gift box is given to the class. The students open it, and guess what’s inside—Squeak and Mimi! The two beloved hedgehogs as gifts represent another important lesson. Through a puppet play, Mimi explains what it means, and it becomes clear to the students: they are gifts to themselves and each other! How? This lesson reveals more!

Time, energy, possessions, money, talents, thoughts, actions, and feelings are one’s personal resources. Wise management of these resources is called self-management, an essential life skill that sets one up for success. Pre-kindergartners need to learn and practice this skill at an early age to help them handle different situations easily.