A Lesson on Honesty

This year, as part of my religious education class for first graders, I decided to add a virtue of the month to the class. For one whole month, every Sunday we meet, the kids will learn about a virtue. We are using the free program from the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia. I am loosely following along with this program. I love how the Sisters introduce the kids to a virtue and a saint.

This past month, our virtue we focused on was Honesty. The saints for honesty were Blessed Francisco and Blessed Jacinta. I found a wonderful coloring page of Our Lady of Fatima at Catholic Playground for the kids to color.

We spent a few minutes talking about why it is important to be honest and always tell the truth. We talked about how when we lie people learn not to trust us and doubt us. One young girl mentioned the story The Boy Who Cried Wolf. This was a perfect example of how our relationship with others change when we lie. The kids were quick to point out that Thou Shall Not Lie is one of the 10 Commandments that God gave Moses.

To help stress this point, I demonstrated  how lying works with some cups. I stacked a pyramid out of cups and explained to the kids that when we tell the truth our friendships are strong and sturdy, but if we start to lie to our friends and family, our lies will weaken our friendship. I asked one young man to come up and take out a cup, representing a lie. When he took the cup out the pyramid of cups all fell, just like our friendships would fail or crumble away. If our friends and family can't trust us, we can't build a strong base for our love.

Following our discussion, my aid read a charming little tale about a spider and a fly. I found the story and printout over at little miss Suzy Q. This little tale opened up the conversation to how we shouldn't be deceived by other's lies, especially the devil's!

"what a tangled web of lies we weave, when we first choose to deceive."

After listening and talking about the story, I had the kids create a spider to remind them that when we lie we get all tangled up in them just like the fly in the story. She fell for the spider's lies, got all tangled up in the web, and was eaten!

I searched all around for an easy craft for the kids to make. I found this idea at Our Craft~N~Things.

I thought the spiders were so cute, I didn't change much. I did add googlie eyes, since all kids LOVE googlie eyes. I did write the word Honesty on the spider's belly to help the kids to remember to always be honest.

"Honesty is always the best policy."

It was a great lesson and the kids had fun while learning.

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