Character counts: other great read-aloud books and bulletin boards...

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Character counts: other great read-aloud books and bulletin boards...
By Schoolbox

My favorites are "The Giving Tree" (Shel Silverstein), "The Rainbow Fish" (Marcus Pfister--sp.) and "Andrew's Angry Words." These books can help serve as springboards for discussions of desirable character traits such as
kindness, generosity, and friendship.
Here are suggested learning/bulletin board activities to follow the first two books. The Giving Tree: Create a classroom's "giving tree" with butcher paper and pass out leaves for student to write what they can "give" to the class (tangible and intangible things such as helping friends in need, sharing supplies, being a good friend...). Glue the leaves

onto the tree and headline it "The Tree of Friendship." The Rainbow Fish--Perhaps after the children get to know each other a little bit better: Make a large fish out and many colorful "scales" with construction paper. Make enough smaller white scales for each chich. Scales should be large enough to for students to write a sentence. Have students pick out a another student's name randomly from a jar/index cards and then write kind and encouraging words (or best attribute) about that student. Glue student work/white scales on top of the colorful scales. Glue the colorful scales to the fish. Decorate it with some silver/aluminum foil scales and plastic wiggle eye.