Written by Jamie Martin, editor of Simple Homeschool and founder of Steady Mom
Character education is a long-term project. For many of us, it’s one of the reasons we homeschool–to be a guiding force in our child’s character development. Personally I hope my children will become young men and women of character ready to take on, challenge, and change the world around them when the time is right.
Much of character training has to do with modeling, being an influence throughout the course of our child’s entire lifetime.
But there are certain occasions when you may want a tool to point you in the right direction or provide a launching platform from which to discuss virtues with your child. At other times we may notice specific behaviors that we’d like to address in a creative (non-nagging) manner.
Resources our family has found helpful:
- The Children’s Book of Virtues
– a collection of stories, poems, and fables categorized by virtue
- Fairy Tales – One of our sponsors, Oak Meadow, includes fairy tales as part of both their kindergarten and first grade curriculums. Fairy tales are generally viewed as one of the best ways to introduce young children to the concept of good and evil and the character qualities that heroes represent.
- Two of our favorite fairy tale collections are The Tall Book of Nursery Tales
and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
– though there is at least one story in each book I’ve skipped for various reasons. I’m always looking for collections with the classic stories but without frightening illustrations.
- A Children’s Bible – I’ve found it challenging at times to find a Bible to read with my children that doesn’t include dumbed down, cartoon-type illustrations. Our favorites so far have been Children’s Everyday Bible
and Egermeier’s Bible Story Book
.
Other Resources to Consider:
- KONOS Character Curriculum – This unit study curriculum includes topics based on character traits including generosity, courage, and wisdom.
- Drawn into the Heart of Reading – A Christian literature guide that incorporates character-building exercises
- Further Up and Further In – A unit study based on The Chronicles of Narnia
This week, even as you may be making plans for the upcoming homeschool year, keep your priorities balanced and remember that character training is also a foundational part of our children’s educations.
Do you have any character education resources to recommend?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I just purchased “Everyday Graces” by Karen Santorum…it teaches manners through literature and I’m really excited to start reading it with my girls. I’ve seen several recommendations for it online, so we’ll see…
Ashley\’s last blog: Sharing
I just ordered CQLA – Character Quality Language Arts. It looks great and focuses on one character trait a month. It incorporates lots of writing, grammar, etc.
For children’s Bibles, the Jesus Storybook Bible is hands down my favorite. It’s unbelievable.
Sharing a post from The Homeschool Classroom with more ideas on the same subject: http://www.hsclassroom.net/2010/07/creating-a-culture-of-virtue-learning-in-your-home/
Kami\’s last blog: An old favorite- sand painting
I’ve been working through Rebecca Manor’s guide entitled, TEACHING CHARACTER THROUGH LITERATURE (Beautiful Feet). It has extensive lists of rich literature for both Primary and Intermediate Grades and questions that coincide. Honestly, these works most often speak for themselves. We rarely move through the questions formally, as my daughter comes up with plenty of her own. She’s captured by these books (and honestly, so am I).
Cari\’s last blog: Common Ground
Yes! Thanks for addressing character education. It’s woefully absent much of the time in curriculum planning.
We’ve enjoyed using “family time” materials from the Center for Biblical Parenting, specifically the Kids Honor Club and the Hero Training Camp materials. http://www.biblicalparenting.org/
We recently purchased The Young Peacemaker by Corlette Sande. It teaches children (grades 3-8) how to deal with conflict God’s way. We are excited to incorporate it into our schedule this Fall.
Our son will be 5 in September and we are starting to “officially” teach him this year. The two things I put on my list of goals for the year are character development and reading readiness! I was excited to see this blog post covered character. I don’t have any resources to share yet, but one idea I had is to graph good and bad characters from the movies he likes to watch. After the movie I will ask him to tell me about the movie and name good characters and why he or she was good, then do the same for bad characters. We can then print an image of the character (hopefully!) and place it on a Good vs Evil graph or maybe godly and not godly qualities. That puts CD into pre math and reciting what he has learned.
Thanks to previous posters for the additional resources!