Leadership

This was a fun topic!  My kids were familiar with the idea of a leader and many seemed to have already decided if they were a leader or not.  I enjoyed challenging that notion and helping them to see that anyone can be a leader.

To introduce the topic, I told the kids that we were going to be learning about leadership and asked them to think of some good leaders.  They came up with leaders they had learned about, such as Abraham Lincoln, as well as leaders within the school and classroom, such as patrols and our SCA representative.  Then, they talked with a partner to brainstorm characteristics of good leaders.  They were able to come up with many on their own, which I added to the chart shown below.  Next, we watched a Kid President video about leadership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdL4o7wU0CQ&t=57s .  In the video, Kid President talks about why leadership is important and then asks kids what makes a good leader.  After watching the video, I again asked the kids to think about characteristics of good leaders and this time, they were able to add even more ideas.  One characteristics that I really focused on in this lesson was that leaders are not always the people in the front of the room, or the people that say their ideas the loudest.  Many people lead in small, quiet ways but still help to make the world a better place.  I wanted my quieter kids to know that they could be leaders, too.

In the next lesson, we learned about the difference between bosses and leaders.  Many of my students who are natural-born leaders struggle with this; they have such strong ideas that in group situations, they take charge and tend to get bossy.  We did a sort together as a class to determine which characteristics were true about bosses, and which characteristics were true about leaders.  I think this lesson helped my kids to gain a clearer understanding of how to be a leader without being bossy.

The next week, we revisited the topic of all students can be leaders by talking about being proactive.  We read a story from "The 7 Habits of Healthy Kids" about a squirrel that is bored and can't find anything to do.  He asks all his friends to help him think of something fun but he doesn't like any of their suggestions.  Eventually he realizes he can make his own fun.  This led to a discussion of how to be proactive within the classroom.  The kids learned that they are in charge of themselves.  To end the lesson, we made a craft in which the kids made little people and wrote about ways they could be proactive.  Pictures to come!

Finally, we ended the month by watching Alex's video and meeting her challenge.  First, the kids had to write about characteristics of good leaders.  They were able to think of many good ideas based on what we had talked about in the first two lessons.  They also had to write about what made them good leaders. 

In the second part of the challenge, they had to think of someone who was a good leader and write about what made them a good leader.  They had to write a paragraph about the person, which was a great integration with our language arts curriculum.  They came up with a wide variety of people, from world leaders to historical figures to family members to people in our class.  Here is just a small sample:

We really enjoyed this topic and I will be sure to revisit it throughout the year to reinforce the idea that all of my students can be leaders!