To contemplate and cherish
About CCP
Compassionate Children Program
As initiated by The D. H. Chen Foundation and curated by the School of Everyday Life, the Compassionate Children Program (CCP) has been successively implemented in P1 to P3 in two Seed Schools and four Partner Schools since January 2020. CCP is a collaborative project involving local school teachers and various experiential learning partners, aiming at developing a compassion-based life education curriculum that can be integrated into school subjects like Chinese Language, General Studies, Visual Arts, Physical Education, and Religion, etc.
About CCP
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Cultivating Compassion Through Personal Encounters
We offer a variety of experiences that are rich in emotions and encourage thinking about life values in order to cultivate children's awareness of, thus responsibility towards, the inner self, others, the environment and the world.
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Reconnecting Learning and Everyday Life
We value the human sensory-affective as well as cognitive abilities. By implementing a diversity of explorative and hands-on activities, children are encouraged to connect subject knowledge with their daily lives, enabling them to experience and then act out of compassion in a personal yet broad-minded manner.
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Connected Thinking and Decision-making
We let children dig into their interdependent relationship within the world, probing them to further investigate the rippling effects of their behaviors. In so doing, we seek to develop a far-sighted and holistic perspective that embraces differences in worldviews and values.
Our pedagogical approach
Compassionate Sensibility
- Be sensitive to the inner voice
- Be an attentive and empathetic listener
- Be empathetic and be able to care for self as well as for others
Compassionate Thinking
- Be observant of the interconnectedness of all things
- Be far-sighted and mindful of the possible consequences of one's action
- Be thoughtful of our influence upon others and the community
Compassionate Action
- Be caring and deliberative in action
- Be able to revise one's way of living with good intentions and prudence.
- Be creative, broad-minded and open-hearted in our encounters in the world
Curriculum Development
Adaptive Integration of Life Education into School Subjects
Children are invited to experience and appreciate compassion on various sampling facets of daily life. These facets are organized into a theme-based curriculum with four topics, on which relevant educative activities are adaptively designed in order to be integrated into various subjects, in correspondence to specific goals of different participating schools.
Four curriculum topics：Nature, Agri-Food, Community, Citizenship
Nature: To appreciate the unpretentiously harmonious co-existence of all things in nature
- Learn to read signals of nature by observing visible cues from daily lives.
- Perceive how changes in natural cycles may impact our daily life, and discover the web of relationships behind our interdependence with nature
- Learn to cherish nature with love, appreciation and responsibility.
Agri-Food: To raise concern for the values of the earth and all living things through understanding the food we eat
- Gain insights about food through direct experiences from the five senses, planting experiments and cooking trials
- Investigate into food production and appreciate how soil, water resources, natural sources of energy, climate, solar terms and ecosystems work together to make food production possible
- Recognize the connectedness between food and our lives, be thankful of the blessings from nature and learn to humble ourselves by steering our eating habits towards a healthier lifestyle.
Community: Understanding one's own needs and those of others through exploration of shared spaces and community life
- Investigate into the environment as shared spaces and community lives in order to discover one's own roles, abilities and responsibilities in different settings.
- Learn to attend to the feelings and needs of oneself as well as those of others, and help to develop the community into an interdependent and mutually supportive network.
Citizenship: Cultivating citizenship through nurturing humanistic-altruistic virtues
- Through reflecting on daily encounters, be aware of one's existence as a social being and rethink one's relationships with friends, school and family.
- Through participating in discussions and collaborations as well as learning to listen and respond to others, children can know themselves better and enhance their empathetic understanding of others.
- Children are encouraged to voice out their opinions on a variety of issues and invited to try create a different world in pursuit of one another's well-being.
Community Development
CCP Co-learning Community of Educators
CCP is a collective effort committed to engage school teachers and experiential learning partners from a variety of professions in order to collaboratively develop curricula and host professional development workshops on life education. A variety of activities will be held in the future to bring together educators and community members who are interested in teaching and learning compassion in classrooms of all subjects. It is our hope to extend our support to more teachers in their classroom practices and, in the long run, initiate systematic changes in the teaching and learning of life education.
Contact Us
If you have any comments or enquiries about the program, please share with us by completing the feedback form or send us a message via Facebook or Instagram.© 2025 The D. H. Chen Foundation. All rights reserved.
