The Leader in Me: Honesty
We believe every child has the qualities of a leader; they just have to be discovered and fostered within each child! This month’s leadership quality we’ve been working on with children is Honesty.
It is important for children to learn how to be honest with one another and with themselves. When they are honest, they are able to build trusting relationships with those around them. Learning to be honest with themselves teaches them to address more complicated emotions that they are feeling or admit to mistakes. Even when it is difficult, honesty allows a child to learn from their actions in the future.
An honest leader serves as a role model for those around them, helping to maintain organization and trust. That is why our staff role models honesty with each other and the children. Young children will imitate what they see and hear from those around them.
Honesty is the stepping-stone to other qualities like trust, respect, humility, and integrity. An honest leader is someone who is open, trustworthy, and inspires others. It is important to teach children to be honest in order to discover their true potential for leadership.
Encouraging Positive Behaviour
At Childventures, we teach our children to be honest a number of different ways. We believe in encouraging positive behaviour by providing virtue vouchers to recognize a child who is displaying the virtue of honesty.
Clear Expectations
We establish classroom rules that stress the importance of everyone telling the truth. This ensures that the children of CV understand the educator’s expectations and values about honesty. Letting the children know that we aren’t upset if they admit the truth. Our second step curriculum provides opportunities for this to be practiced with the use of social skill stories.
Learning through Play
Childventures also teaches children to be honest through play. We play the Truth or Lie? game. To play the game one person makes a statement that is true or a lie. The others have to guess whether they believe the statement is a lie or not. Start with easy questions and work toward harder ones as the children progress.
Stories like He shouted, Help me! Wolf, wolf, wolf help instill the value of being honest as well.
Using these techniques, we hope to teach the Childventures students the importance of being honest using our Virtues Project.