CARING

Creating the Climate

1. The caring value is the very heart of ethics. This principle very much involves people. Thus, be caring to students, faculty, parents, custodians, and cafeteria staff.
2. Demonstrate that people become mere instruments when people consider themselves ethical and yet don’t treat other people with respect.
3. If one is not caring of another, will it ever effect their honesty, loyalty, fairness, and respectfulness towards the other person?
4. If you are caring towards other people do you have an emotional response towards their failures and successes?
5. Should we care for the environment, and, if so, demonstrate the results both for and against.
6. Select caring characters from literature. List their relationships to others.
7. Rewrite the story of Scrooge by Dickens, making him out to be a wonderful caring person, and develop it into a skit.
8. Plan a project week. Zero in on older citizens and demonstrate as a class that you care. Interview the ones you helped listing all the positive responses to the principle of caring.
9. Decorate the room inside and out with words related to caring: kindness, love, concern, warmth, friendliness, caregiver, nurture, charity, support, encouragement, give, and provide.
10. Encourage students to recognize and acknowledge the attitude of caring in one another and also in community people.
    

Infusting the Character Quality

1. Identify care as it relates to the environment. Develop skits about caring and illustrate these through the use of finger puppets.
2. Have "secret pals" drawing the names of fellow students leaving genuine note cards, favors, or acts of kindness to one another without giving a clue to whose name was drawn.
3. At the end of the week reveal the secret pal and have each one tell what someone did for them describing the effect it had on their week. 5. Have the class prepare one large "caring" project for the community unannounced to the community and wait for "feed back". Have them describe their reaction to the feed back.
4. Have a "random acts of kindness week." Have the student do the deed anonymously during the week. Have a class discussion on how the deed effected the doer. Remember that the deed doesn’t count if the recipient finds out who did it.
5. Have a panel of respected citizens come and discuss how a caring event effected their lives in the community and why.
6. Play hug-tag or musical chairs. Have students who have been left out describe the feeling. Play it again, but this time give words of encouragement to those who are left out. All discuss the difference.
7. Have student’s parents record three caring things their children did in the home during the week. Have them placed in an envelope to be opened in class and read to fellow students. The contents should be unknown to the student until read in class. Students should discuss how this makes them feel towards their parents.
8. Have someone research the life of Lord Shaftsbury of England and have him or her recount his benevolent life before the class.
9. Have a "Class Biography Week" in which they tell the lives of people who cared in American society.
10. Research the life of Mother Teresa and what she meant to the people of Calcutta.
    Consult National Geographic looking for materials on ecology as it relates to the Siberian oil fields, and noting what the need for caring did to the land.

Contributed by Peggy Adkins