Do you want to promote character education in your classroom? These little tokens can be used to reward good character, or used for bucket filling. It’s such a cute way to remind your students that good character ROCKS! Let’s make some DIY Character Rocks to use in your classroom.
DIY Character Rocks – What You Need & How To Do
Items to Gather:
- Smooth Rocks (we used river rocks)
- Fine-tip Sharpie
- Buckets – small (optional – such as these in link)
Instructions:
1. Using the fine-tip sharpie, write the character traits on the rocks. I used plain black, but you could “dress them up a bit” by writing in color. You can keep these rocks in a pretty dish in the classroom and give them out to students when you see a particular trait being demonstrated.
2. OR … you could turn your character rocks into an interactive and rewarding display in the classroom.
3. We discuss “bucket-filling” as a whole school, and are reminded daily to “fill someone’s bucket” over the announcements. So, I decided to tie our character rocks into our bucket-filling program. I used a glue gun to attach the Character ROCKS signs to the front of the buckets.
I then filled one of the buckets with the character rocks. I also attached some of the actual rocks to my bulletin board with a glue gun. The rest of the materials were simply laminated and stapled to the board.
4. The students then took charge of recognizing good character in their fellow students. When they saw a classmate demonstrating good character, they chose the corresponding rock from the bucket, filled out the card (shown below), and glued the rock to the corner of the card. Completed cards were placed in the last bucket.
Once a week (during lunch or at the very end of the day) character rocks were presented to students. I always made sure I checked the bucket a day or two before character rocks were given out to ensure there was a good variety of students receiving rocks. I also added rocks to recognize good character (and to make sure some of the students didn’t feel left out).
DIY Character Rocks – Other Tips & Suggestions:
You could use the character rocks to earn special rewards for the whole class. Each time the entire class deserves a little extra recognition for good behavior, a character rock could be filled out and attached to the bulletin board.
Once the class earns a certain number of character rocks, they could be rewarded with an extra gym class, a homework-free night, or a movie party … because after all, good character ROCKS!
To see a bit more detail or pictures on how to set it up to use in your classroom, click on this link.
For more reading check out:
Suggested Summer Reading for Entering 3rd Graders