Teaching Kids To Be The Change

We start our school year by teaching kids to take action and be the change in their communities.  We help our students to identify their communities. We focus on the central idea that, "The values and actions of individuals impact communities."  We explore values, rights and responsibilities, and the impact they have on different communities in the student's lives and the lives of others around the world.

Kid president has several videos that help get this message across, but we like to start with this one.


We read many of the classic back to school read aloud books such as:

• Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes
• A Fine, Fine, School by Sharon Creech
• Me First by Helen Lester
• Decibella by Julia Cook
• Spaghetti In A Hot Dog Bun by Maria Dismondy
• The Name Jar by Yansook Choi
• My Mouth Is A Volcano by Julia Cook
• What If Everybody Did That? by Elen Javernick

With each of these books we focus our discussion around the values that are displayed by the different characters, and the impact of their actions on the community around them.  Not only does this help us to have discussions about what we want our own classroom community to look like, it helps us jump off into the larger concept of our responsibility to our global community.

Have you been to Disney's Citizen Kid website yet?  If not, you really need to check it out! It is filled with inspiring videos and pictures of kids around the world taking action to be the change in the world!  We watch several of these video clips and use a graphic organizer to record the community, the citizen, the action and the impact in each video.

We also recently discovered Epic has many wonderful  FREE books that support this unit, these are just a few that we have read so far!

These are just a few of the resources we use to inspire our students to be the change in the world.  To read more about some additional resources on this topic please check out these posts on my blog Mom2punkerdoo.