Becoming Leaders

This was a great topic for my first graders to talk and think about. I am pretty sure that most of them did not consider themselves to be leaders before our lessons on leadership but were starting to consider the possibility by the end. We started by watching Lex's video which the children always enjoy. They really think of him as a friend as well as a mentor and he always has great advice for them. This sparked their thinking about who they think of as leaders in their lives and what characteristics leaders have. We brainstormed all of the people in their lives who are leaders, they wrote about family members and staff members at school as well as other students in our class. Then we talked about the qualities of leadership. They mentioned things like: being strong, working hard, caring about others, being helpful and being nice. I challenged them to think of themselves as leaders and to think about what they could do to be even stronger leaders.