Character Builders – Encourage Thankfulness in Your Home

Definition of Thankfulness from Websters 1828 Dictionary: 

“Impressed with a sense of kindness received and ready to acknowledge it”

Thankfulness implies a readiness to act!  In this podcast, Kathy and Lesli talk about concrete ways to teach this to children throughout your day.  This is a great month to not just think happy thoughts about how much we appreciate people but verbalize and repay their kindness. 

1.     Focus on you! What are you modeling?

2.     Teach your children to notice large and small things that others do for them and make sure they follow through on being thankful.  

3.     Cultivate a thankful heart through out the day. Let your children hear your appreciation.

Use concrete teaching methods:
• Playing Highs and Lows at the dinner table           
• Creating a “Thankfulness Jar” to add to and review as a family
• Car games:  What is the best thing about…….? Let everyone take picking things and answering….
Frogs, my brother, rain, being sick in bed, mud, traffic, lollipops…. It is engaging and challenges them to “flip the script” of negative thought patterns. 

4. Use books and stories! Here are some of our favorites! 

• Luke 17:11-19

• The Giving Tree by Shell Silverstein
• All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon
• The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

5. Resources for Parents

• 1000 Gifts by Anne Voskamp
• Monthly Printouts for Things to be thankful for and photograph
• Laying Down the Rails – A Charlotte Mason Habits Handbook by Sonya Shafer
• https://annvoskamp.com/joy-dares/

6. Favorite Thanksgiving Verses and Quotes:

• Psalm 136 – Use as a read and response at the family table
• “A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.”
• “Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soul out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.” – Henry Ward Beecher