Need Help in Teaching Character Education? - Little Library of Learning

The Importance of Social-Emotional Learning

Character education is an essential part of a school’s social-emotional learning curriculum. In society, people need to identify their emotions and (hopefully) channel the positive emotions and control the negative emotions before they get out of hand. Just as we teachers instruct our students on other life skills, we need to teach them to be kind and tolerant of others and to persevere when things get tough. So many parents let kids quit karate, piano lessons, Boy Scouts, chess club after a few meetings. They need practice in sticking things out. Or, they call the school to complain about every setback or interfere in children’s playground disputes. Children need to learn to be tolerant of failure and resilient to try again when things don’t work out.

In our school, we enacted a character education program. Banners were hung up around the school, marking the hallways as Politeness Path, Tolerance Turnpike, Kindness Court, Pride Parkway, Responsibility Row, Perseverance Place, Fairness Freeway, and Empathy Avenue. The students do monthly lessons on character education. In the library, I have many books on character education. When perseverance was the theme for March, I read Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss. Horton never gives up on his promise, despite many obstacles. (It also tied in with Dr. Seuss’s birthday, which is March 2d).

Character Traits in Reading Passages

Do your students struggle to identify character traits in ELA passages? Identifying character traits is a vital skill in understanding a story. What was the main character’s motivation? Was he or she ambitious? Honest? Scheming? Why did an antagonist plot against the main character? Was he or she jealous? Righteous? Greedy? Did a character’s actions show that he or she was bigoted or tolerant? Kind or mean-spirited? Were they lazy or hard-working? Did they demonstrate empathy? Perseverance?

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There are so many books today about character education. Some are a bit didactic with themes like Jason Helps Out. But as a librarian, I preferred the texts that are entertaining stories by themselves, with the moral or lesson as a bonus.

Surround Yourself with Positivity

We also installed murals with inspirational messages such as “Surround Yourself with Positivity,” “It’s Cool to Be Kind,” “You Never Fail until You Stop Trying.”

You can have fun teaching character traits while also supporting your character education program. I’ve created a Google Slides activity with a superhero character trait theme. It is available on my Teachers pay Teachers store. The students read a little scenario and try to identify the character trait being depicted. On some slides, a superhero flies off when the correct answer is selected. On others, the image spins around. There is even a built-in puzzle that is built piece by piece as students answer correctly. You can assign Google Slide decks through Google Classroom or do them together on the Smart Board.