Sample RULER Curricula
Early Childhood
RULER programming in early childhood settings includes learning units and core routines that embed seamlessly into the classroom. This content provides children with opportunities to safely explore their own feelings and the feelings of others and to build their emotional intelligence skills through practice and play. RULER tools are taught in the context of feeling words, allowing children to use tools in context.
Each unit is designed around sharing stories, both our own and well-loved children’s literature, and includes plans for learning centers; including art, music and movement. Units focus on emotion vocabulary to support the emerging emotion knowledge and skills students this age need to safely express and regulate their emotions.
Click on the Early Childhood sample lesson below
Click on the Lower Elementary sample lessons below
Click on the Upper Elementary sample lessons below
Elementary School
RULER for Elementary School (K-5) is a developmentally appropriate and comprehensive curriculum that builds students’ emotional intelligence and contextualizes it within their experience of the world. RULER provides students with authentic learning experiences to build the five SEL competencies as identified by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL): self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making, relationship skills, and social awareness.
The RULER for Elementary School curriculum is comprised of 18 units per grade (K-5) with each unit having four brief lessons. Six units focus on concepts and applications of the RULER tools (the Charter, Mood Meter, Meta-Moment, and Blueprint). The remaining twelve units focus specifically on acquisition of a progressively complex emotional vocabulary and are referred to as the Feeling Words units. These two unit types combine to develop students’ emotion knowledge and skills as well as a comprehensive emotion vocabulary.
Middle School
RULER for middle school is comprised of five instructional units focusing on issues relevant to this age group, guided by project-based learning (PBL). PBL units allow students to take an active role in their classrooms, solve problems, participate in group discussions, and conduct real-world experiments while learning emotion themes and concepts. The middle school approach continues to leverage the RULER tools and provides numerous opportunities for using them in the larger units through reflections, projects, and lessons designed to hone the five RULER skills.
RULER for middle school allows for interdisciplinary study and ensures that learning is student centered and inquiry based, as each unit positions students to gain knowledge and skills by investigating and responding to the unit’s driving question. The themes of each unit are consistent across grade levels, but the focus of each grade and its feeling words varies, centering on developmentally appropriate emotion concepts. RULER for middle school addresses students’ understanding of themselves, including their habits, qualities, and characteristics. Students build a deeper understanding of their best self by examining it in the context of relationships, personal values, goal setting, conflict resolution, and well-being.
Click on the Middle School sample lesson below
Click on the High School sample lessons below
High School
RULER supports adolescents with the advanced social and emotional skills they need to navigate high school and life beyond high school. In addition to enhancing school and classroom climate, RULER offers a high school curriculum that encourages students to explore the impact of emotions in their lives, the development of their emotional intelligence, and how they can apply emotion skills to enhance their learning, decisions, relationships, and performance in and out school.
RULER for high school consists of 80 lessons, 20 for each year of high school. Year 1 (lessons 1-20) is the introduction of the RULER skills and tools, and years 2 – 4 (lessons 21-80) are developmentally appropriate for 10th – 12th grade students. With the RULER approach, how you implement depends on the needs of your school. The high school structure is flexible and can be shifted based on when RULER was introduced in your school, the grades your school serves, and other variables.
Social and Emotional Learning Competencies
This crosswalk details how the RULER skill-building activities and tools map onto social and emotional learning competencies.
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