Ecosystem Skills Overview
This page shows how the nine Literacy for Kids curricula develop a connected set of skills. Each curriculum builds one cluster of abilities — but the skills reinforce one another across the collection.
Core Skill Families
Systems Thinking
Primary curricula: Environmental Systems Literacy, Health Systems Literacy
Supporting curricula: Decision Literacy, Civic Literacy, Emotional & Social Literacy
Students learn to see the world as a set of interconnected systems with inputs, outputs, feedback loops, and failure modes. They practice identifying how parts relate, how changes propagate, and why individual actions produce collective outcomes.
Skills developed:
- Identifying parts and boundaries of a system
- Tracing cause-and-effect chains
- Recognizing feedback loops (balancing and amplifying)
- Understanding carrying capacity and resource limits
- Modeling cycles and flows
Decision-Making and Reasoning
Primary curricula: Decision Literacy
Supporting curricula: Financial Literacy, Media Literacy, Civic Literacy
Students learn to separate good decisions from good outcomes, reason about probability and uncertainty, recognize cognitive biases, and apply structured frameworks to real choices.
Skills developed:
- Thinking in probabilities rather than certainties
- Identifying cognitive biases (loss aversion, sunk cost, availability heuristic)
- Applying expected value reasoning
- Distinguishing reversible and irreversible decisions
- Using iterative design and reflection
Financial Reasoning
Primary curricula: Financial Literacy
Supporting curricula: Decision Literacy, Civic Literacy
Students learn how money and economic systems work — from the origins of trade to banking, inflation, and value creation.
Skills developed:
- Understanding value, trade, and exchange
- Budgeting and managing opportunity costs
- Understanding interest and how money changes over time
- Recognizing financial risk and the role of emergency funds
- Designing simple value-creating solutions
Digital Citizenship and Technology Literacy
Primary curricula: Computer Literacy
Supporting curricula: Media Literacy
Students learn how computers, the internet, and AI tools work, and how to use technology responsibly, safely, and creatively.
Skills developed:
- Understanding how the internet and devices work
- File and information management
- Basic coding and computational thinking (sequences, loops, debugging)
- Understanding AI: capabilities and limitations
- Digital safety and privacy habits
Media and Information Reasoning
Primary curricula: Media Literacy
Supporting curricula: Decision Literacy, Computer Literacy
Students learn how media is constructed, how attention and algorithms shape what they see, how to verify claims, and how to produce media responsibly.
Skills developed:
- Identifying purpose and perspective in media
- Recognizing persuasion techniques
- Source verification and lateral reading
- Understanding the attention economy
- Responsible media creation
Civic Participation
Primary curricula: Civic Literacy
Supporting curricula: Legal Literacy, Decision Literacy
Students learn how communities organize, how governments function, and how citizens can participate effectively and constructively.
Skills developed:
- Understanding rules, cooperation, and social contracts
- Understanding branches of government and checks and balances
- Local civic action and problem-solving
- Nonpartisan civic reasoning (how systems work, not which side to support)
- Community proposal and presentation
Legal Awareness
Primary curricula: Legal Literacy
Supporting curricula: Civic Literacy
Students learn how rules, agreements, and legal systems are structured — from contracts to rights to courts.
Skills developed:
- Understanding why rules exist and how they are designed
- Analyzing contracts and agreements
- Understanding rights and protections
- Applying precedent and due process thinking
- Creating and stress-testing group agreements
Emotional Regulation and Social Navigation
Primary curricula: Emotional & Social Literacy
Supporting curricula: Decision Literacy, Civic Literacy
Students learn to read their own emotional signals, understand how cognition and reactivity work, and navigate social systems with intentionality.
Skills developed:
- Identifying emotions as information, not commands
- Recognizing and interrupting reactive states
- Understanding trust, boundaries, and communication
- Navigating social dynamics and peer pressure
- Designing behavioral protocols for recurring friction
Environmental and Ecological Awareness
Primary curricula: Environmental Systems Literacy
Supporting curricula: Health Systems Literacy
Students learn how planetary systems work, where human industrial systems intersect with natural cycles, and how to propose circular, sustainable alternatives.
Skills developed:
- Understanding energy flow and matter cycles
- Recognizing linear vs. circular system designs
- Analyzing carrying capacity and resource limits
- Designing circular redesigns for linear processes
- Community proposal and iteration
Health Decision-Making
Primary curricula: Health Systems Literacy
Supporting curricula: Decision Literacy, Emotional & Social Literacy
Students learn how the body functions as a biological system and how to make intentional, informed decisions about their own health.
Skills developed:
- Understanding homeostasis, feedback loops, and the body's control systems
- Recognizing how food, sleep, movement, and environment affect the body
- Understanding immunity and threat response
- Evaluating health claims with appropriate uncertainty
- Designing and testing simple health-supporting protocols
Cross-Cutting Skills
These skills are developed across most or all of the curricula.
| Skill | Strongest in |
|---|---|
| Evidence-based reasoning | Decision, Media, Environmental, Legal |
| Discussion and communication | All curricula |
| Applying concepts to real-world examples | All curricula |
| Iterative design and reflection | Decision, E&S, Environmental, Health, Computer |
| Recognizing systems and tradeoffs | All curricula |
| Vocabulary building | All curricula |
How the Curricula Reinforce Each Other
The nine curricula are designed to be independent but mutually reinforcing. A few natural progressions:
- Computer Literacy + Media Literacy — Understanding how technology works (Computer) supports critical evaluation of what technology produces (Media)
- Decision Literacy + Financial Literacy — Probability and tradeoff thinking (Decision) underlies every budgeting and saving choice (Financial)
- Civic Literacy + Legal Literacy — Understanding how communities organize (Civic) connects naturally to how agreements and rights work (Legal)
- Emotional & Social Literacy + any interpersonal curriculum — Regulation and communication skills strengthen every collaborative discussion in every other curriculum
- Environmental + Health — Both treat their subject as a physical system with feedback loops, carrying capacity, and the goal of sustainable maintenance
There is no required sequence. Start with any curriculum and the skills transfer.
Standards Connection Note
For detailed standards connections, see the skills-alignment.md document within each curriculum's documentation. The ecosytem skills above can help educators map to:
- CASEL SEL Competencies — Emotional & Social Literacy, and social dimensions of other curricula
- C3 Framework for Social Studies — Civic Literacy, Legal Literacy
- ISTE Standards for Students — Computer Literacy, Media Literacy, Decision Literacy
- Jump$tart / CEE Financial Literacy Standards — Financial Literacy
- NGSS Science and Engineering Practices — Environmental Systems Literacy, Health Systems Literacy
- Common Core ELA Speaking & Listening — all curricula (discussion-based format)
See each curriculum's skills-alignment document for specific mappings.