Serious Stuff, Fun Application

I did this activity with a group of 16 girls ages of 8 and 11 from my church. It was a fun discussion and a very successful activity on personal qualities. This activity could be tweaked to talk about the qualities that make a good citizen, family member, student, scout, friend, club member, athlete, volunteer, baby sitter..... and the list goes on.

Some of the points we talked about were:

That some qualities come natural to us and others we have to work on to develop.
How our qualities effect our relationships with our families, friends, and our Father in Heaven.
We briefly talked about poor personal qualities and how they can be bad for us and others.
How our qualities are unique to each of us like our looks, the color of our hair, and our personal likes.
We discussed the qualities of Jesus and how we should pattern our qualities after his perfect example.

After our discussion I gave each girl a cut out of a girl (I purchased them pre cut in white card stock in a multi-pack from Michaels. They also had boy cut outs available.) with markers and crayons to personalize her cut out to her own individual liking. The girls LOVED this activity.

I then gave each girl a print out on hot pink card stock of a list of personal qualities. We stapled the now colored cut out to fit along side the list. There was also a line on the paper for the girls to write their name.

We then followed up with five more steps:

Go through the list of qualities and mark an (X)  by those qualities that you like in others.

Go through the list of qualities and mark a (STAR) by those that  you see in yourself.

Go through the list of qualities and mark a (+)  by those that you would like to improve in yourself.

We then lined all of the papers along two tables. The girls then made a (check mark)  by the qualities that they see in each other on one another's papers. Every quality listed was a positive one so each check mark was a compliment among young friends. Awesome!

We stopped and discussed any qualities that the girls did not understand as we went through the list and they were invited to add any additional qualities that they thought of.

To follow up on this activity each girl was to choose one quality that she would like to develop in herself  and then write down ten things over the next two weeks that she did to practice the chosen quality.

I am going to tweak this activity myself for my upcoming "Top Secret" Grandma Camp. What personal qualities would make a good "Secret Agent".......  and the kids will have a great time coloring their cut outs in a fun secret agent disguise.

It will be a teaching moment and they won't even know it!