Hakuna Matata or Hard-Knock Life: What is Your Responsibility?
Area: Film, History and Social Studies, Music
Grade Level: Primary/Elementary School
Topics: ethics, Fairness, morality, responsibility
Estimated Time Necessary: 45-60 minutes
Lesson Plan
Objectives:
Thinking together about personal and social responsibility.
Activity:
- Watch the videos ahead of time and review the potential discussion questions below.
- Tell children that you are going to show them two videos and you want them to pay attention to the messages of the songs.
- Show “Hakuna Matata” video to children, followed by “It’s a Hard Knock Life.”
- After the video has ended, take one minute of quiet reflection for them to write down any questions that arose for them.
- Ask students to share questions, and write them on the board.
- Invite students to vote on which question to discuss.
- If students have difficulty coming up with questions, you can use ideas in the Discussion Questions tab.
- To close the conversation, the facilitator should summarize main points that arose throughout the discussion and recognize whether the class came to a consensus or not.
Discussion Questions
- What is responsibility?
- What responsibilities, if any, do we have to other people?
- Does everyone have the same responsibilities? Why or why not?
- Do we have responsibilities to ourselves first or to other people? Why?
- What is fairness?
- Is it important to make the world fair? Why or why not?
- How are responsibilities and worries related? Are they the same?
- Can you exist in the world without worry? If so, how? If not, why not?
Resources
This lesson plan was created for PLATO by: Lena Quijano and Sarah Vitale.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
If you would like to change or adapt any of PLATO's work for public use, please feel free to contact us for permission at info@plato-philosophy.org.
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