Positive Mistakes!

The school I am currently at uses the Character Counts! Program for our Character Education program. I found some excellent lesson ideas from the site and one of my favorites is used to teach the Responsibility Pillar (Our Pillar of the Month for November).

I used this lesson under "Positive Mistakes (4-6)" with my second graders in a Classroom Guidance lesson and I feel they really enjoyed it! It was appropriate for their level and we were really able to extend the lesson into some valuable discussions. I was very impressed with how engaged and creative they were!


With the lesson comes a free worksheet. The worksheet is pretty much a plain sheet of paper with a big black mark in the middle (to represent a mistake). Students then turn the mistake into something beautiful. We focus on the importance of fixing our mistakes and being responsible for our actions. I followed the lesson plan for the most part except I used the book, "Harriet and the Garden" By Nancy Carlson .

I gave the students a lot of freedom and allowed them to turn their paper around and be creative! Here are some of their results!

"Underwear" 

"Heel"

"Red Pear" 

"Pirate Ship"

"Dinosaur" 

"Tooth"

I was super impressed! What are some lessons you have used to teacher Responsibility?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Skits

Since my school uses Character Counts! Six Pillars of Character , I try to incorporate the Pillars into my Classroom Guidance Lessons as much as possible. This week, I used a grab bag of different items to reiterate the different kinds of Respect that we sing in our school song (Respect Yourself, Respect Others, Respect the School, Respect Learning). Then, I grouped students into four groups and they had to create skits on their type of Respect (They had to show disrespect AND respect in the same skit).

The skits were absolutely hilarious and I was very impressed with how creative the students were. With my fifth graders, I even made it a little more challenging and had them incorporate random props into their skits (hula hoop, giant lady bug, dog puppet, and an obnoxiously massive cardboard tube I found). It was a huge success.

One of the funniest things that happened was when a student was using a hula hoop in the "respect for learning" skit. He took the hula hoop and was tapping another student who was pretending to study. When she asked him to stop, he said, "Where in the rule does it say no hula hoop tapping on other people while studying?" I love my students. I love my job.