What Is Self-Awareness?

Self-awareness is an incredible skill that enables us to consciously perceive, understand and recognize our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, weaknesses and motivations. With this awareness, we can gain a clear understanding of ourselves, including our emotions, beliefs, values, and perceptions, and how they influence our actions and interactions with others. It’s an empowering process that leads to personal growth and positive relationships.

Self-Awareness for Kids

Teach Starter has designed a worksheet aimed at building your students’ sense of self by looking at how actions are influenced by thoughts and feelings. Using a specific cause-and-effect scenario, students will understand the importance of taking ownership of their thoughts and feelings and the outcomes that result from their behavior as a response. Furthermore, students will learn to reflect on their actions, encouraging self-awareness and the ability to make better decisions for themselves in the future.  

In this self-awareness handout, students are given a real-world scenario and asked questions that will guide them in determining the character’s self-awareness. They are then prompted to reflect on a past decision of their own and write about it.

Responses to the questions will vary, but an answer sheet is provided to help with the assessment.

More Ways to Use Our Self-Awareness Worksheet 

Looking for more ways to use this SEL worksheet? Give your students additional opportunities to connect their thoughts, feelings and behaviors with these activities for deeper reflection. 

Turn & Talk 

Invite students to pair up with someone in the seat nearest to them for a 5-minute Turn & Talk. Keep students engaged and on task by directing them to focus on the scenario they wrote about in question 5. Use this Turn & Talk session to encourage students to make space for each other and develop a better sense of self-awareness by empathizing with their classmates’ experiences. 

Draw It! 

Challenge your students to create posters educating others about self-awareness. They can work in teams of 4 to create a poster for each of the 4 steps (Thought-Action-Feeling-Connection) and even create a slogan to go with their work. 

Journaling

Make reflection a weekly activity by encouraging students to keep a journal. Using question 5 from this worksheet as a writing prompt, ask students to take the last few minutes of class on Friday to reflect on any of their actions from the week. 

Change the Difficulty Level if Needed

To better help students understand the concepts, go through the scenario as guided practise. Walk your students through the questions by challenging them to think about a personal decision that called for self-awareness.

Easily Prepare This Resource for Your Students

Because this download includes the answer sheet, we recommend first printing one copy of the entire file. Then, make photocopies of the blank worksheets for students to fill out on their own. 

This worksheet can also be converted to an electronic format and uploaded to your digital classroom. 

Before You Download

Please note this resource is available in Google Slides or as a PDF. An answer key is also included with this download.

This resource was created by Jennifer Hall, a teacher in North Carolina and a Teach Starter Collaborator. 

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