Growing up presents many challenges and positive learning experiences. Helping young people understand, name and talk about their and other peoples’ strengths can improve their relationships with their friends, family, and the wider community.
The interactive Character Toolkit Strengths Cards enable children to learn, recognise and express all sides of their character. The cards promote character strengths such as perseverance, grit and leadership alongside moral and civic strengths such as gratitude and kindness.
These cards have been designed to allow teachers, parents and counsellors in coaching settings to explore all character strengths within children. Included is a booklet of different activities that provide suggestions for using the strengths cards. These include activities that encourage children to describe the strength they are most proud of, or how to identify strengths in others around them. These positive, helpful and authentic strengths cards will be a useful classroom resource, focusing on encouraging the next generation to be their best self.
The pack of cards contains 30 character strengths, which we have chosen as a focal point for children to learn to recognise and express all key facets of their character.
The first 10 strengths in the list are intended for use with the youngest children (age 3-5), based on research into the strengths most commonly expressed and understood by this age group. All 30 cards are suitable for use with older children, but of course you know your children best, so we leave it up to you to use whichever cards you feel are most appropriate.
Topics covered:
- Curiosity
- Humour
- Excitement
- Love
- Kindness
- Imagination
- Teamwork
- Sensibility
- Persistence
- Gratitude
- Bravery
- Fairness
- Forgiveness
- Honesty
- Hope
- Optimism
- Humility
- Judgement
- Leadership
- Perspective
- Respect
- Adventurousness
- Friendliness
- Patience
- Helpfulness
- Self-reflection
- Confidence
- Community Spirit
- Focus
- Bouncebackability
Useful for schools, school counsellors or social workers. Possibly parents who wish to use these cards to encourage self-esteem and confidence.
Review:
“The cards have been used with children ranging from Nursery to Year 5 and all have been able to engage at different levels. The language used makes them very accessible. The children could talk about resilience as ‘bounce-back-ability’ and could make links to personal experiences. The content of the cards really helped them to think about their approaches to learning and life. For example, at Lancot, we often talk about being brave in our learning and using the cards such as ‘Adventurousness’ added depth to this. The prompts on each card proved to be helpful and relevant, as they enabled the adults to begin and sustain the dialogue between groups and with individuals. It’s very easy to see the potential for how these cards could be used in a whole-class setting, as well as small groups and one-to-one.” – Jenny Fraser, Deputy Headteacher, Lancot Challenger Academy.
