Truthfulness

For this week's moral character we'll be focusing on truthfulness. I picked this one to focus on first since Owen has just began to lie. I wanted to start teaching him words that go with his actions since when I tell him to tell me the truth and not to lie I'm not sure if he truly understands what I'm saying. Which brings me to this week's lesson. How do you teach a kid what it means to lie and to tell the truth without using the words truth and lying? Here is what we did today for our training time...hope you find some helpful tips to use in your training and please share your ideas too!

* I created a new page for our "Cook Family Virtue" scrapbook titled "Truthfulness". I wrote out a few Bible verses on what God says about lying and about telling the truth. Check out the photo to see what I wrote down. I went through this with the kids. I've also gotten Owen's Church Bible out and we are looking up the verses in his Bible so he can see that it's not just on mommy's scrapbook, but in fact coming from the Bible.

* To help explain the idea of telling the truth and lying I picked a few objects around the house and told a "lie" about them. For example, our rocking chair which is orange. I said to Owen and Anna "if mommy said this chair was purple, would that be the truth or would that be a lie?" Anna kept telling me "no, mommy it's not purple it's orange!" Find some other things that you could easily demonstrate a lie vs a truth. You could even make some flash cards and have the kids say truth or lie about things you say about the cards.

* I have a book that I enjoy reading with the kids called "First Virtues for Toddlers" by Dr. Mary Manz Simon. She has a story about truthfulness called "Piglet Tells the Truth". Whats great about this book is that they also "share what the Bible has to say" regarding the particular virtue of the story. You can purchase individual stories from Amazon.com or if you have access to LES you can get the 12 story in one book there for around $10. This collection is nice since it also includes parent notes in the back to give you further ideas on how to teach the different virtues to your kids.

* Another idea is to find ways throughout the day that your child is being truthful and focus on being truthful (remember, that's the behavior you are wanting, so show your kids ways you see them being truthful throughout the day...of course you still need to have consequences for the lying).

* It's important to stress why we tell the truth -- not only because the Bible tells us to, but because it builds trust. And we want to be able to trust each other and our friends so we need to always tell the truth so people will trust us.

Hope that helps get you started on some ideas. I'll post more later this week as I try to develop the concept of being truthful further.