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Sunday, June 15, 2014

Character Education

 In my opinion, teaching character education is as important as teaching reading, writing, and math. Character education should be a daily part of everyone's classroom. Learning how to be a good citizen, and to be responsible, and trustworthy, is just as important as learning how to read and write.

In my classroom, we honor one student a month in a school assembly. First, I introduce each monthly trait, we read books about it, discuss it, and write about it. My students write about what each trait means to them and how they feel they best demonstrate the trait. This is an image of the writing template.


Then, the voting begins!




My students privately fill out the ballot and put them in our classroom mailbox for me to tally. The student who gets the most votes, is the one honored at the school assembly. Then, we have runner ups. Could be one, two, or three runner ups, depending on the number of votes. We honor these students in our classroom.

I have these cute character trait posters hanging in  my classroom. 



They make a beautiful display and the children refer to them often. They really come in handy when we are talking about character traits in the characters we read about. They like to compare themselves to the characters in our stories.

Along with the posters hanging in my classroom, I have a bulletin board display in the hallway to honor the winners each month. The winners fill out this writing template...

I hang their finished writing activity and a sign that says the name of the trait and their name. For example, if I won for caring, the sign would look like this...

These signs are editable so you can easily type in the names of the winner(s) each month.

I always discuss with my students that not everyone is going to win a character award, and that does not mean that they don't exude good character. I don't want anyone to feel sad or excluded if they don't win. This is a good opportunity to talk about how they will not win everything in life. I don't want my students to grow up thinking that they will always come in first place and win every trophy and get everything they want. We have many open discussions about this fact of life. It's important to try and it's important to accept if you do not win or come in first place.

If you would like to hang these posters in your classroom, you can find them here or click on the image below.


I hope you and your students enjoy them as much as we do!

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