We Choose Virtues Schoolhouse Crew Review

Recently, I had the opportunity to do a review from We Choose Virtues. I received the Parenting Cards the King James Version.  I also received the Download Bundle.

 

The Parenting Cards cost $38.49

The Download Bundle cost $7.99  

The Download Bundle includes the following items:

Teacher's Handbook (PDF Download)

Family Character Assessment (PDF Download)
Kids of VirtueVille Coloring Book (PDF Download)
Butterfly Awards for Kids (PDF Download)

Sing –along-Song sheets

We Choose Virtues is recommended for use with children ages 3-11.

We Choose Virtues is a character education program to help remind those little hearts the importance of  making  good Godly choices and how to act on those virtues. There are 12 different virtues that are the main focus of the program. 

 

Parenting Cards are the heart of the program. You can choose either the NIrV or KJV format. The Parenting Cards are printed on a heavy cardstock around 5”x7”. I am thinking with as much handling you do with the cards it would be nice to laminate them. The cards are very colorful and two sided. Each card has a character which is related to a virtue. The characters are absolutely adorable whether you have a girl or boy your child will find one that they love. On the front side of the flashcard there is a catchphrase to each virtue. Then you have a brief explanation of that particular virtue along with a Bible verse. On the backside of the flashcard it has teachable moments, Virtue User Challenge, story of each character, and what to say after “I’m sorry”.

 

The virtues are:

I am PATIENT

I am DILIGENT

I am HONEST

I am HELPFUL

I am FORGIVING

I am SELF-CONTROLLED

I am KIND

I am PERSEVERANT

I am GENTLE

I am ATTENTIVE

I am OBEDIENT

I am CONTENT

The Teachers Handbook is PDF with 50 pages and contains a lot of different ideas on teaching each virtue. I prefer a physical copy so I printed it off and used my comb binder to keep in all in order. 

This isn’t your typical teacher’s handbook in my opinion. I was expecting a how to do the program handbook. It’s more of a general way to introduce a virtue and not a step by step how to use the program. I thought it was a bit confusing as it didn’t explain how to use the program. I was expecting more of an outline of the structure of the program. They do recommend that you make each lesson short. Maybe, it was just me and I just missed the point in the Teachers Handbook. The Teachers Handbook had a lot of inspiring thoughts to motive you to teach your child virtues. I thought some of the suggestion just weren’t practical for a small homeschool setting.

Family Character Assessment is a brief description of the virtues that ask you to rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10. It’s what I call a heart check-up. Both the kids did a fairly accurate job on what they felt they needed to work on in their character. I really liked the assessment and they recommend you do it more than once in the program. 

Kids of VirtueVille Coloring Book is a PDF and is 16 pages that have the virtue characters that matches the Parenting Cards. I printed the coloring pages for both of my kids and used my comb binder to keep it all together in a book. The pages not only have the virtue character but also have the virtue word on the page.

Sing–along-Song sheets has 12 songs to go along with each virtue.  These lyrics are to help the kids remember the virtue.

Butterfly Awards for Kids is an award certificate. Very colorful and eye catching certificate and what kid doesn’t like to know that they have done a great job. 

How have I done We Choose Virtues in our homeschool?

We added this to our Bible Study every morning and we did two virtues a week. At the beginning of the week we review all the previous virtues that we have went over.

Let me back up before we even begun We Choose Virtues we did the Family Character Assessment and we talked about how we answered each question and how do we think we could improve our assessment. As a mom I really enjoyed this part of the program. I was happy to see that my kids made such an honest heart felt attempt in recognizing what areas need some improvement in. It made them think about how to improve those areas that aren’t so great in their character.  

 Little Man felt he lacked greatly in being diligent and quickly made his bed every morning with out me nagging him. He has been doing it for 4 weeks without me reminding him.

We would read the name of the virtue and the Bible verse. My kids really enjoyed the character associated with each virtue. My daughter would right away want to find that character in the Kids of VirtueVille Coloring Book and try to color it the same way as the card. The kids worked on the coloring page for more than one day. My son would just color it to match his style. I had the kids repeat the Bible verse with me three times together.

We would then work on the back of the card. We would talk about how to implement that virtue into our week. We discussed the section on “What to say after ‘I’m Sorry” and we did the “Virtue User Challenge” or one of the “Teachable moments for… families”. We would talk about how we could do something different to make the situation better. It really made my kids thing about their actions and how they respond to situations.  We only spent around 10 minutes a day on each card so depending on how much discussion we had would depend on whether we Sang the Sing –along-Song sheets. My kids were not to trilled on this so I just read it out loud after the first few times of trying to sing it.

After 2 to 3 days on a virtue I would hang it up for the kids to see. I would have them give themselves an assignment to work on that virtue for the day. When I noticed them doing that assignment in the day I would praise them and give them a small surprise. (M&M, Smarty, or a sticker) Sometimes they even got the Butterfly Award.

This was pretty much how we worked on all the virtue the last couple of weeks.

Overall, I really liked We Choose Virtues. You can tell that a lot of heart and passion was put in this program. It was a nice addition to our daily Bible Study. My kids really loved it. It was a fun program that my kids really benefited from.

 As mom I think we are always teaching our children character and virtues. I think actually putting a name and a face on that character and virtue really makes an impression on little hearts. We are teaching them to choose to make the right decision in a fun and loving way. It sometimes seems like I was always teaching them character and virtues when they get caught in the act of making a wrong choice. It probably seemed so negative to them before. Now it was fun learning about character and virtues. The last few weeks when they got caught in the act of making a wrong choice it was more positive for them and they quickly took ownership of their action.

 I did see some positive outcome with my children. It was a real fun way to teach your kids virtues without nagging them when they are caught in the act of making bad choices. If you have a tight budget I feel that you could get away using just the Parenting Cards and the Download Bundle. We Choose Virtues does have a variety of programs to choose from. A lot of the packets look very appealing.

We Choose Virtues is offering a discount code.  Enter the promo code BTS20 for 20% off anything in the We Choose Virtues store, good through August.

Here are the social media links for We Choose Virtues:

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/wechoosevirtues
Pinterest –  http://www.pinterest.com/WeChooseVirtues/
Blog -- http://www.wechoosevirtuesblog.com/