“Good Leaders Taking Action: What does it look like when good leaders get others involved to make a positive change?”

This year’s theme builds on 2022.  What are the things that leaders and our community members are doing to make our neighborhoods, our island community, and our planet home better?  Leaders and community members – that’s you and me – must work together if change is going to be impactful, meaningful, and generational.  What do you see leaders and community members doing in your neighborhood, our island community, and our planet home?  What do you want to see?

Connecting Language Arts to Visual Arts

We invite teachers to begin by creating a language-rich environment around the theme and taking personal action as a class, grade level, or entire school.  This is a great opportunity to share and discuss current events.  Invite a local organization that is doing good to share about their work.  Have them show pictures of what they do and let them story tell.  Create a Good Leaders Taking Action Word Wall and write down key words from their storytelling.  Many middle and high schools have clubs or students who are active in the community and are doing great things.  Send a message to middle and high school counselors to invite these clubs and students to come into your classroom to share the amazing things they’re doing.

The next step is to bring the theme into your personal life.  As a class, grade level, or school, decide on a short-term project that will enhance the life of your school.  Keep track of the project visually with sketches.  Students need not do individual sketches.  Rather, students can contribute to a group sketch, each adding a portion of the big picture.  Considering doing this group sketch in three parts: beginning, middle, and end.  Have groups share out loud as each sketch is being created.  Point out when you see students taking on leadership roles (e.g. when a students offers a suggestion, when a student gets the group going).  Continue to add to the Good Leaders Taking Action Word Wall throughout the process.  Introduce news words related to the words on the word wall.  Don’t be afraid to introduce big words.  If ‘hard worker’ shows up on your word wall, introduce ‘diligent,’ ‘self-motivated,’ and ‘trustworthy.’  Use your word wall to select books with characters or themes that reflect the words on the word wall.