Welcome! You've found the online home for Happy Kids's Program for Upper Level Students, a course offered at Happy Kids for our secondary students.

Throughout the course of the year, the program’s students follow a curriculum that combines middle school language arts with history, geography, and civics in a manner of instruction that reflects what one would see in a typical US classroom. The curriculum, designed and facilitated by me, Mr. Brunken, follows my vision of helping today’s youth understand the changing, information saturated world around them, and the increasing importance of being able to interact positively with people from cultures all over the world and to access, interpret, and evaluate the information we receive. The increasingly globalized nature of Taiwan's society and economy that this generation will have to navigate make for problems that their grandparents couldn’t even imagine. This class is meant to educate students about important global issues, help them to learn from our past and each other to broaden their understanding of their world and help bring about a peaceful future, and learn to process and evaluate information in a way that will prepare them to be effective and responsible democratic citizens of the world.

Each year the curriculum for this class is a little different. However, the overall format of the class remains constant. Four novels are used as the inspiration for four eight-week units throughout the year. This year will look like this: