Character Education Writing Prompts for Middle School— Character education helps kids learn more about basic morals and values and their importance in this world and in their personal lives. Character-building is often included in character education curriculum, both of which are widely taught in classrooms across our country.
Many schools have a set of chosen values that get incorporated into a specific character education curriculum. These are often the most important values chosen to teach to the student body so as to cultivate these values. Some typical character traits that are taught in many middle school classrooms include lessons on caring, fairness, responsibility, respect, and trustworthiness.
Also, character education about citizenship is an important subject as well because of the importance of teaching good character to our nation’s youth and of ensuring that future leaders possess essential life-skills such as honesty and integrity.
Below is a list of character education writing prompts you can use to support your character education efforts in your classroom. We hope you and your students find them useful!
33 Character Education Writing Prompts
As stated above, some common character education topics taught to middle school students include citizenship, caring, fairness, responsibility, respect, and trustworthiness. What follows are writing prompts centered around these character education themes.
- Are you a good citizen and why?
- What makes a person a good citizen?
- Do you and/or your family participate in community service? How?
- How do you do your share to make the world a better place?
- Are you a caring person?
- Explain in detail how do you treat people kindly.
- How do I know when someone cares about me?
- How do you help people who are in need?
- Do you think about how your actions will affect others?
- If you hurt someone’s feelings by accident (or on purpose), what can you do to make it up to them?
- Do you treat others the way you would like to be treated?
- I always play by the rules because…
- Fairness means treating people…
- Why is fairness important?
- I know when someone is being unfair when they…
- How does it feel to be treated unfairly?
- What do you think fairness is?
- Being a fair person is important to me because…
- What does it mean when someone tells you to take responsibility for your actions?
- What happens when you behave irresponsibly?
- How does taking responsibility affect your relationship with others (friends, parents, teachers…)
- Are you a responsible person? What makes you a responsible person?
- Others can depend on me because…
- I do what needs to be done because…
- I demonstrate respect to others by…
- What actions and behaviors make me respectful?
- How do you honor differences in others?
- What does it feel like to be respected?
- Why is respect important in my life?
- I know I can trust someone when they…
- I show others they can trust me by…
- How do you benefit from being trustworthy?
- What does it mean to trust someone?
I hope you enjoyed this list of character education writing prompts for students.
“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.”
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Teaching Character Education to Middle Schoolers
Beyond writing and journaling, below we briefly outline a few additional methods for teaching character education in your classroom.
First, literature is a wonderful and highly effective tool to demonstrate morals and values to children because story-telling helps them to understand these types of deep concepts.
Books with colorful pictures and entertaining stories have been used by teachers for many years to inform and pique childrens’ interest in a particular subject. Character education books may be used in many different ways with children, but the most effective method is through stories combined with experiential learning activities.
Secondly, role-playing is a great teaching technique for supporting character education. Role-playing activities give children the opportunity to place themselves in a hypothetical situation where they experience things from another’s perspective. They can also put common character education themes into action which is experiential education at its best if you ask us!
Finally, after reading a story and discussing it, educators may have students perform a variety of activities that help children fully understand the values they have just learned.
Interactive activities encourage students to identify more profoundly with the characters and the dilemma they were facing. Additionally, group discussions and story expansions, as well as written exercises, are some of the more powerful and effective ways to elicit understanding and comprehension of character education in children.
Of course, we think that journaling is a great character teaching tool. If you need even more character education writing ideas, see our What Is Good Character post that includes 9 more prompts you can use in your classroom. And, check out these Character Building Activities for Kids.
There are many great thoughts for kids to ponder and to write about in their personal journals.
Until next time, journal on…
“Our character is what we do
when we think no one is looking.”
~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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PS Check out this excellent student character resources.
