Submitted by Judy Coombs
I purchased the "Character Counts" bulletin board display for beginning social studies. Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship are the "pillars of character advocated by the Character Counts program. However, these attributes are fairly universal, and useful whatever program you use in social studies.
As a part of class meeting/social studies, we examine one character aspect a week, discussing, "What does this look like in the classroom, on the bus, in the lunchroom, on the playground and at home?" Finally, students choose to illustrate and write a sentence about what that week's attribute looks like to them. Additional personalization can come with mounting the picture of the illustrator on the back of the preceding page.
With a bound book completed each week, you will have resources for students by students. The language arts connection is fairly obvious, but you can also tie into math with the concept of attributes, reading with characteristics of main characters in the book, and with science using the concept of properties. This multiple language for a common idea across the curriculum may be more appropriate for third and fourth graders, but attributes and attribute study begins early in mathematics.
