Personality

Personality is one of my favorite things to teach. When I was growing up, I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't like all the things the popular kids had to do to be popular. I wasn't outgoing and I certainly didn't want to constantly surround myself with people. It wasn't until college that I found out my personality is what drove my behavior all those years before. Instead of being "wrong", I just had a different personality type than those social butterflies at school. Since then, I have been a sort of personality crusader.

I like to do a lesson on personality as part of my self-esteem curriculum. I don't teach this lesson every year, but I like to make sure that I teach it at least once in each student's career.

This year I used three books to teach about personality differences:

• Lacey Walker, Non-Stop Talker by Christianne Jones (Lucy is an EXTROVERT)
• The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig (Brian is an INTROVERT)
• Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley by Aaron Blabey (Pearl is an EXTROVERT and Charlie is an INTROVERT)

The students were very captivated by these three stories. The illustrations are fantastic in all three books, which helps.

After reading the first two stories, I usually have the students respond with which characters were most similar to themselves. Most classes were split pretty evenly between extroverts and introverts. I spent some time discussing how the two personality types were different. 

Once students have an idea of their own personality, we discussed how both types of people are necessary. I ended the lesson with Blabey's tale to help students see that the two friends each had great things to offer -- that one personality wasn't better or worse than the other...just different.

I finished with a coloring sheet called "My Personality Coloring Sheet". I instructed students to only color those things that were true for them.