Lights, Camera...Let's Begin Our Positive Actions!

Lights, camera, action! Have any of you ever seen one of these? It’s called a clapper board and it’s used on the sets or locations where movies are filmed. As the cameras roll, taking moving pictures of the actors, clapper boards appear at the beginning and the end of a piece of film. When the director says, "Action," they want the actors to say their lines or do as they’ve been directed. When directors don’t like what they see, they can say “Cut” and the actors can re-do their actions. It is easy to get the correct actions on a film for a movie. Filmmakers can choose the actions they want and cut the actions they don’t want.

Real life doesn’t work that way. We all know that actions are things that we do and we know our actions affect everyone around us. This year we are going to learn how to use positive actions . We will also learn that we feel good about ourselves when we think and do positive actions, and we make those around us feel good, too. We will learn how to be our own directors, saying "Action" when we act positively and "Cut" when we act negatively. Let’s practice saying that phrase: "We feel good about ourselves when we do positive actions, and there is a positive way to do everything."

We want to remember this because it will help us learn the rest of the lessons all year long; it will also help us throughout our entire lives. If we understand that practicing positive actions makes us feel good about ourselves, we have the key to success and happiness, something we all strive for. Now we’ll do a role-playing activity to help us learn the difference between positive and negative actions.

Use this activity to demonstrate the use of the clapper board. Have some children role-play, helping a child who is new to the school find his way to the cafeteria. As they finish, say that you appreciate the way the children helped the new child and then open the clapstick on the clapper board to reveal the words "Positive Actions." (See Publisher’s Note for modification to this strategy.) Have another group role-play telling another child that he can’t play with them. As they finish, say that you didn’t feel very good when you saw them telling the child that they couldn’t play, and then close the clapper to cover up the words "Positive Actions." Be sure the class understands that you are not judging the quality of the role-playing but the behavior involved in the situation.

I’ll leave this clapper board in the room and when I see someone using positive actions, I’ll open it up. If I see someone using negative actions, I might say "Cut" and close the clapper board. Let’s pretend like we’re making a movie in our class. They don’t send movies to theaters until they’re perfect, so let’s try really hard to roll with positive actions and cut out negative actions. We want our movie to be a blockbuster! These positive actions will help us feel good about ourselves. When we feel good about who we are, what we are doing, and how we treat others, we feel happy and successful. As we continue the Positive Action lessons, we will learn more and more ways to practice positive actions.

We’re going to learn the "I Am a Positive Action Kid" song. We’ll use it a lot throughout the year. We just learned the difference between positive actions and negative actions, and this song will help us remember to use positive actions.