Hobbies And Interests
Objectivity Exercises
Help students become strong leaders with good character by teaching them how to be objective. Various exercises are offered to teach this skill. One such activity involves using several magazines for reference. Select magazines that focus on international places and people, their cultures and their daily rituals or routines. Instruct your group to sit in a circle and pass around the literature. Ask students to pick one image and state what they believe to be true about the featured person. Instruct participants to focus on the details of the offered image when trying to ascertain the reality of the circumstances or situation. Next, hand the same image to a different player, and ask him to give a different take on what is going on in the image. The point of this exercise is to help youths learn that things, people and situations aren't always what they first seem.
Honesty Building Options
Teach children the significance of honesty in leadership. Instruct all participants to reflect on their favorite stories or book characters and to select the one that shows the greatest amount of honesty. Read the story as a group, and have each child stand up after her story and share what she finds most compelling about the character's behavior. Help young children be able to adequately express themselves by writing key words or phrases that reflect honesty on the chalkboard. End this group discussion by requesting each child share one experience in which a trusted friend lied and how that made him personally feel.
Service-Oriented Projects
Teaching children and teens the benefits of completing service-oriented projects helps them learn respect for strangers. They also grow to realize that ideas, circumstances and problems other than their own personal ones matter. Start small when initiating weekend projects to focus on this aspect of moral leadership. Pick the neighborhood of one child, and go door to door asking families or seniors if they need help gardening, cleaning, walking their pets or cleaning out pet habitats. Assign one youth group leader to be responsible for each task that needs to be completed. Bestow that leader with all the duties and task assignments attached to getting the job done. At the end of each home's project, hand out a "report card" to all other youth workers, and ask them to grade that house's leader on his efforts and effectiveness.
Applying Emotion to Leadership
Help young people learn what positive moral leadership entails by encouraging them to explore their feelings and share them with the group. By understanding and adequately expressing their own feelings in a healthy way, they are enabling themselves to be sensitive toward and understanding of strangers. One activity that can easily be done indoors prior to heading out and partaking in community activities involves sharing a personal experience. Instruct each youth to bring in one object that causes her to feel strong emotions. Each participant stands up in the circle and identifies her object and then tells a story about how she acquired the item. Address what emotions each person was feeling at the time she received it, as well as how it makes her feel that day. Also, ask all kids what are some benefits of acknowledging their emotions.