Nurturing virtue: The Adventures of Mali and Keela

I know it has been a while since I did a Nurturing Virtue post. There are two reasons for this, one is that I am working on a rather large project related to our virtue studies, which I will eventually share as a whole on this blog, and you will understand where my energies have been going (I just don’t have time at this point to duplicate my efforts into the project I am working on and posting it here too, but it will eventually be available to all of you in its completed form).

The second reason is that we have been taking a little break from our usual routine to work through the book Mali & Keela: A Virtues Book for Children.

It is a chapter book filled with stories about the adventures of these two friends. Each chapter/story incorporates four virtues. At the end of each chapter there are review pages where you can read the definitions of the virtues used in the story, reflect on how/when they were used in the story, and then questions which foster further discussion of the virtues and how we use them or what they look like in our own lives.

The book was not written by the authors of the The Family Virtues Guide, but it is based on this program and can definitely be used in conjunction with the Virtues Project cards and books.

We read a chapter once every 2-3 days, then spend the time in between chapters going through the review section and thoroughly discussing each topic and learning quotations related to these virtues (this part I have added myself).

This book provides another enjoyable way in which you can discuss and share virtue learning with your children. There are also many fun activities you could do with your children, building on the stories and discussion.

On a side note: for those of you who do not follow this blog on Facebook, I shared a link to an interview on Oprah with Linda Kavelin Popov, the co-founder of The Virtues Project. So, if you are interested in seeing that, hop over to my Facebook page.

Happy weekending to you all! We will be out enjoying the first wonderful signs of spring and celebrating the Baha’i New Year (March 21st) which completes our 19 day fasting period and ushers in the new year and new season…a change I have never experienced quite this acutely, spring here is really like a re-birth after a long, cold winter. It is truly a celebration!

Nurturing virtue: “The Good in Me from A to Z by Dottie”

I apologize, I know it is not good form to say I am back and then disappear for a week! BUT the kids and I were hit with a nasty bug that has kept us home and in bed for a whole week! So, we really haven’t been up to much this past week, but I wanted to share something we did together the week before.

We spent several mornings during circle time reading through the book “The Good in Me from A to Z” and working on the accompanying workbook. It is a sweet little book, easy to read and understand. We read through the book once, then we went back to the beginning and discussed in detail the virtue each page was describing. I also asked them for examples on how they used that virtue in their own lives.

The next morning I pulled the book out again and read through it. This time I gave each of them a copy of the page at the back of the book, which asks them to write or draw the good in them. I asked them to tell me about one of their good qualities. Damian said the “good in me is my heart” and Rylan said “the good in me is that I love to read and learn”. These are the pictures they drew to illustrate these qualities.

“The Good in Me from A to Z” has a workbook that goes along a with it too. We used several of the activity sheets during the course of the week, and I am sure I will use them again as we continue to work through specific virtues in more detail.

Nurturing virtue: Learning about compassion

Part of learning how and when to show compassion is learning how to understand and read other people’s emotions. When we recently spent a week studying compassion, I made a stack of “emotion cards” for the boys (examples in the image below).

I laid them out and taking turns I would ask them to “please pick up a card that shows someone who is excited”, or angry, sad, happy, confused, worried, etc.

Some of the images lead to discussions about why or how the person ended up feeling that way, and how we could show compassion to someone in that situation.

Several times during that week Damian chose to pull out these cards again and work with them, sorting them, and asking me questions about them. Boys especially need to be encouraged to understand emotions at a deeper level, as society rarely affords them this opportunity (actually often the exact opposite, they are encouraged not to feel or show emotion!).

Nurturing virtue: cleanliness concentration game (printable)

This past week the boys and I have been learning about the virtue of cleanliness. There are so many great activities to do with this virtue, we have had a lot of fun. This morning we played a cleanliness concentration game that I made for them over the weekend.

Below are some sample cards from the game (cards are 4x6 size).

There are more cards included in the download. I printed them out on cardstock and then laminated them using 4x6 sized laminating pouches, so they last through a lot of use.

My boys loved this game! Rylan helped Damian find sets and he told me at the end that it felt really good to work as a team instead of trying to win (mommy smiled inside BIG TIME)!

You can also use these cards as flashcards, to make a cleanliness flip book, to play a “go fish” card game, to play a matching game (like concentration, but with the cards facing up, so it is easier for younger children). There are probably lots of other ways to use them too!

You can download the cleanliness concentration game here. Have fun!

Added to Preschool Corner and 5K too.

My first post over at The Homeschool Classroom!

A couple of months ago I was invited to become a contributing writer for The Homeschool Classroom by its founder Angie, which I have been very excited about ever since (it has been hard to keep it under wraps)! The Homeschool Classroom is an excellent resource on all topics related to homeschooling and I have been a subscriber since the day I found it many moons ago. I feel very honored to be a part of the great team of authors that write for the site.

Today my first post was published, entitled “Creating a Culture of Virtue Learning in Your Home” and I would love it if you went over there to take a read! It is all about one of my favorite topics – virtue education!

Nurturing virtue: prayer book (printable)

Again I am sharing a particular project, rather than a week in review. Praying together is an important part of our family life, in the mornings it is how the boys and I start our learning time together, and in the evenings our whole family prays together before the boys go to bed. I wanted to make the boys their own personal prayer books, filled with the prayers that they have memorized. Actually we have made many different prayers books in the past together that have been well used and loved, but I felt it was time to make them something new and special. As they learn more prayers off by heart, we will continue to add them to the book.

This is what the completed prayer book looks like.

For Rylan's, I had him write his own name on the cover. But he has not seen the rest of the book, I am going to wrap them and give them to the boys as gifts during our next circle time.

If you would like to download the prayer book that I have put together, you can do so here. PLEASE NOTE, however, that some of the images I used in my boy's personal copies were photographs that have been shared with me personally, but I could not include them for general downloading for copyright reasons, so there are a few blank pages for which you would need to include some of your own images to go next to the corresponding prayer. Below are some samples of the pages and images that are included in the download. The pages are size 8"x8".

Nurturing virtue: making a virtue banner

This is a slightly different "Nurturing virtue" post, since it does not focus on a specific virtue, but I wanted to share with you a little project that we have been working on. You may recall that we start each week of learning by defining and discussing the new virtue to be covered that week, then we make a virtue poster to remind us throughout the week of where our focus is.

After the week was over, I had been taking their posters down and filing them in a special virtue binder. However, I thought it would be nice to use some of them to decorate our school area, so we put up this virtue banner and each week we add another poster to it. We just started this a few weeks back, so the banner is not full yet, when it is we will probably start replacing the oldest ones with new ones, so it is an ever changing/updating decoration to brighten up our school space.

Nurturing virtue: Generosity

Here we go on another installment of our virtue learning! We started the week off, as always, defining the virtue and discussing what it means to be generous. During this discussion, I pointed out the generosity is not just about giving "things" or money away (although this is definitely an important part of generosity), but that is also about being generous with your time, with your feelings (in other words being kind and warm to others), with opening our home to others and making them feel welcome here, and so on and so forth.

We followed this discussion by doing our virtue posters for the week. Rylan's depiction of generosity was him sharing a toy with Damian (who interestingly is still at the crawling stage in the picture! ;) ).
We memorized the following quotation: "To give and to be generous are attributes of Mine" taken from "To give and to be generous are attributes of Mine; well is it with him that adorneth himself with My virtues" by Bahá’u’lláh.

We read the following books: Learn About Values: Generosity, Share and Take Turns, and Rylan read Mary Clare Likes to Share to Damian and I. We also read a story illustrating generosity from Vignettes from the Life of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

We sang the Magic Penny song and watched the movie Charlotte's Web, followed by discussing the generosity of the spider Charlotte in the movie.

We made these generosity collages, one to show what "generosity looks like" and the other to show "God's generosity to us".

To practice generosity we cleaned out the toy cupboard, and the boys put aside a few toys that they no longer play with much, but thought a couple of their friends would enjoy and then gave them away to those friends.

There is SO much you can do with your children to teach them generosity, what I have shared is just the tip of the iceberg (as they say). There are so many charities, homeless shelters, nursing homes, etc that you can involve your children in where they can learn about giving both their time and money to help improve the lives of others.

Happy virtue teaching!

Previous weeks: Courtesy and Thankfulness.

This has been added to Preschool Corner & 5k too.

A note about "Nurturing virtue"

I know it is Wednesday and this is when I usually do a "Nurturing virtue" post, but my boys have been sick for over a week, just colds, but BAD ones. It has been a tough week, and as a result we have not been doing our usual work, in fact, there were a few days last week where we did not work at all because they didn't want to get out of the beds I had made for them on the living room couches. This means that we are still working on the virtue we started last week Monday, so I do not have a full week of work to share with you...this occurrence, combined with the fact that I have been given the opportunity to work on a very exciting project (not saying more for now!) has made me re-think the weekly post thing. I will definitely continue my "Nurturing virtue" series, but I think it will probably be more of a once a month post. My boys and I will still be busy with our virtue learning every week, but putting it all together into a comprehensive post avec pictures and descriptions is something I cannot manage every week in light of my "project". So, please forgive me folks! It will keep coming, just a little less often!

Nurturing virtue: Thankfulness (Gratitude)

What we did this week:

After defining the virtue of thankfulness we used finger puppets to act out what being thankful looks like, read this book, then made our virtue posters for the week. {Rylan drew his mom, dad, and Damian…just melt my heart}

We used to save a portion of our circle time to reflect on what we are grateful for at that moment, but last week we changed this a little. Now we carry out this reflection each day during our family dinner. I thought it would be good to do this as a family, instead of just me with the boys, plus it stimulates interesting dinner conversation. We all reflect on our day together, Ramtin gets to hear everything we did and we get to hear about his day, and because it is all done in the light of what we are grateful for, it brings more joy and smiles to the table. It is a wonderful family tradition that I am glad we started, and highly recommend. Recent research has shown that having an attitude of thankfulness can lead to a healthier, happier life; so this is a great way to foster it as a natural part of our children's character (and our own too!). A variation of this activity could be to create a family gratitude jar.

We built this tree of thankfulness throughout the week, adding a few more leaves each day.We played two games related to thankfulness this week – the first one was the gratitude bag. I filled a bag with little cards on which were written things that I know the boys love (are grateful for), plus some pictures of those things (for Damian’s sake). I cut the pictures from old magazines. I also threw in several cards that just said “thankful for”, so the kids could add their own thoughts to the game. We took turns pulling a card out the bag and then explaining why we are grateful for the item on it.

The second game was to list the “best thing” about whatever I called out. I made a list of things, here are some examples: trees, the beach, music, books, sunny days, rainy days, this room, our family, your brother, right now, our neighborhood, dinosaurs, our planet, pencils, paper, fruit, dentists, etc. The goal was to call out the best thing about each of them as quickly as possible, hopefully an exercise in focusing on the positive aspects of things, which is a part of being able to feel gratitude.

We were also going to make a set of thank you cards to have on hand for future need (I have made a point of teaching my boys to always make thank you cards for gifts they are given), but we had the opportunity to spend a day here with friends, so we skipped Friday’s activity…but we had a lot to be grateful for at the end of the day! :)

Happy virtue teaching!

Previous week: courtesy

Added to: Preschool Corner (& 5K too)

Nurturing virtue: Courtesy

Welcome to the first Nurturing virtue post! As you have gathered from the title, the virtue we covered this past week was courtesy. Before getting into the specifics of what we covered I just wanted to mention the activities that we do every week, with every virtue. We start each week by defining the new virtue, this involves me explaining what it means and then together we discuss it further, through asking questions, role playing, using puppets, and the like. Once that is completed I give the boys a blank piece of paper and crayons or markers and they create virtue posters for the week by illustrating what the virtue means to them. We keep these up on the fridge as a reminder of our focus virtue for those 7 days. Each day thereafter we build on this initial discussion of the virtue. All of this work is done during our circle time (Monday through Friday).

On to what we did this week:

We generally use the Virtue Project cards as a starting point for defining the virtue. After we defined courtesy we discussed how it feels when people are polite and how it feels when they aren’t, using role play. I acted some situations out, then Rylan did. After which we made our courtesy posters.

We learnt the following quote: “I admonish you to observe courtesy, for above all else it is the prince of virtues” by Bahá’u’lláh. Throughout the week we revisit this quote during circle time to make sure it really “sticks”. Here is a little trick that I have found to work like a charm – if you want your child to memorize something, sing it. If you do not feel comfortable with creating melodies yourself, use those of your favourite songs or nursery rhymes that have a “catchy” sound to them (this great piece of advice was given to me by my friend and an amazing teacher, thank you Katharine!).

We read two books relating to the theme of courtesy, the first is Be Polite and Kind by Cheri J. Meiners (this whole series of books is really great for teaching virtues) and the second, aimed at a younger age set was Excuse Me! by Karen Katz. We followed these books with singing this song from a Barney DVD we have, which also falls nicely under the theme of courtesy.

We played Being Polite, a very simple game I made up last year to have fun with learning courteous words. Basically I have a list of sentences to read out, each sentence explaining a situation that requires a courteous word in response (for example, "Mommy made you some yummy lunch", "Your friend thanks you for a gift", "You sneezed". For fun I throw in a few silly things to catch them off their guard, like "A monkey climbs up a tree" it makes them giggle and then they concentrate even harder because they are not sure when I will throw in a trick one). In response the kids have to give me the correct polite reaction to the situation. In Rylan's case he uses these little signs which I made for him (it gives him some reading practice too!), he just holds up the correct one. Damian is allowed to shout them out, since he is not reading yet.
Lastly we made courtesy crowns, following the quote that courtesy "is the prince of all virtues". I cut the crowns out of craft foam (you could also use cardboard, felt, or other fabrics) and stuck on the label "courtesy".
They got to decorate them with glitter glue, to make the jewels on the crown (if you used a fabric you could have them decorate with fabric pens or paints, if you used cardboard you could decorate with stickers, if you don't want to get really messy. You could also glue or sew on those fake jewels you find in craft stores, or beads would work too). Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of them actually wearing the crowns!

If you use these ideas with your children, please let me know how it goes, and share any other ideas you may have! Happy virtue teaching!

Added to: Preschool corner & 5K too

Nurturing virtue

Welcome to my new Wednesday themed post! I have previously written about how character development and learning about virtues is an integral part of our homeschooling (you can also see our review exercise here, where we reflected on our learning over the past year), well, recently I did a little searching online and found that although there is much on learning 1,2,3s and A,B,Cs for young children, and everything else they need to turn into smart people, there is not a whole lot out there about teaching them to be good, virtuous people (and doesn't the world need more of that!). So, I decided that I should start sharing our weekly learning activities here every Wednesday...don't know why I haven't done this before! These posts will include everything we have done over the course of the previous week, such as defining the new virtue, books we read on the subject, songs to sing, craft and activity ideas, as well as downloads for materials such as worksheets, puppet cut outs, games, and more (it will vary depending on the theme of that week).

The virtues to be covered will include: courtesy, caring, generosity, helpfulness, kindness, respect, obedience, trust, unity, friendliness, gentleness, patience, peacefulness, service, truthfulness, and creativity to name but a few.

My children are aged two and five, so the learning activities will be aimed at that age range, though I am sure much of it will be easily adaptable to different age groups.

I will be starting off with the first "Nurturing virtue" post next week Wednesday! Hope to see you there, and invite a friend along too! :)