6th Grade Resilience Curriculum

RISE Grade 6 Resilience Curriculum

Middle school changes the environment. RISE helps students strengthen the skills they need to navigate it.

The RISE Grade 6 Resilience Curriculum is a full academic-year social-emotional and resilience program designed specifically for students entering the middle school years.

Through 36 week-long resilience practices and 180 daily learning experiences, sixth graders learn how to understand themselves, manage strong emotions, make thoughtful decisions, handle peer and social pressure, strengthen relationships, develop productive habits, recover from setbacks, protect their attention, and take greater responsibility for the choices they make.

Rather than simply asking students "How do you feel?", RISE challenges them to think more deeply:

What evidence matters? What assumptions am I making? What are my options? What could happen next? Which response creates the strongest outcome-and why?

Students analyze realistic middle-school situations, compare alternatives, test strategies, defend decisions, reflect on consequences, and apply resilience skills to their own academic and social lives.

Enter With Direction
Build belonging, recognize strengths, develop support systems, and successfully navigate the transition into middle school.

Command the Response
Recognize emotional triggers, slow impulsive reactions, strengthen self-regulation, and make intentional choices.

Turn Knowing Into Doing
Examine the gap between intention and action while developing habits, routines, follow-through, and personal accountability.

Protect Attention
Analyze distractions, digital influences, misinformation, boundaries, and the choices that protect focus and well-being.

People, Pressure, Choice
Strengthen communication, perspective-taking, refusal skills, healthy boundaries, conflict management, and relationship repair.

RISE Through Challenge
Learn from setbacks, respond to criticism, evaluate goals, revise plans, explore future possibilities, and build greater self-direction.

Every practice combines engaging scenarios, visual learning, analytical thinking, student reflection, decision-making activities, and structured opportunities for real-world application.

Teachers are supported with a consistent instructional progression:

Teach → Model → Practice → Apply → Defend & Reflect

Student activities incorporate tools such as decision trees, evidence-versus-assumption analysis, trigger maps, habit loops, influence analysis, goal feasibility tests, consequence matrices, strategy experiments, and resilience systems mapping.

The curriculum supports the development of:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management and emotional regulation
• Responsible decision-making
• Communication and relationship skills
• Academic self-efficacy
• Goal-setting and follow-through
• Conflict management
• Help-seeking and support systems
• Digital wellness and attention management
• Resilience through challenge and change

Designed for schools, classrooms, advisory programs, counselors, afterschool programs, youth-serving organizations, and families, Grade 6 provides students with practical tools they can use far beyond a single lesson.

This is not resilience as a slogan.

It is resilience as a skill students learn, practice, test, and apply.

RISE - Resilience. Inspire. Self-Empower.
Human Performance. Built Through Resilience.