Teaching Leadership to Kids

Teaching leadership to kids is something that can begin happening at a young age. We want our kids to learn to be people who can make a difference in our world by making positive contributions as a leader. Leadership can have a lot of faces. You have leaders who are the cheerleaders out front. They are full of enthusiasm and inspire others by their energy and often their words. You also may have a quiet leader who leads by graciously serving. Often times these leaders are overlooked or not thought of when you think of a “leader.” However, they lead by example. People are watching, and their hearts and attitudes inspire others. We all have kids that are different, and we can’t expect them to lead in the same way. Your child can learn to be a leader whether they are currently outgoing, boisterous, shy, quiet, awkward, or charismatic. There are such a variety of characteristics that make a great leader. Today’s activity outlines a few of them.

Some of the characteristics of leaders we are looking at today are:

Leaders have a POSITIVE ATTITUDE:  They say, “Yes, I can!”

Leaders OVERCOME ADVERSITY: They say, “It’s not a problem. It’s a challenge.”

Leaders have PERSEVERANCE: They say, “Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.”

Leaders follow through on COMMITMENT: They say, “I may fail or make mistakes, but I always learn and move ahead.”

Leaders have EXCELLENCE: They say, “I will always do my best.”

These are not my own list of leadership concepts. I got this great list of ideas from Kidz ‘n Power. This activity today will have you jumping back to this link to get a great description of each of these characteristics of a leader. While I did not develop this list, I did develop this activity for teaching leadership, using the descriptions from Kidsz ‘n Power.

The first think I did was go to the Kidz ‘n Power website and copied and pasted their descriptions into my own Word document. I am going to ask you to do the same if you are going to do this activity. I didn’t want to make a printable for you because this is content they created, and I want to honor that. Please click back to print out their wonderful description to enhance this activity.

The next thing I did was take paper plates and wrote on the back of each one the things a leader says.

On the other side of the trait I wrote down the character traits of a leader. I also printed out the descriptions I mentioned from Kidz ‘n Power. I taped those to the this side of the paper plate. My preparation was done, and it was time to start the activity.

I spread the plates out all along the driveway. I was going to do it on the grass, but it was in the morning and there was still dew. I put the side with what a leader says facing up.

The kids then played a game of “Follow the Leader.” One person would start leading the line to the first paper plate. The other kids would have to follow along, copying the leader.

When they would arrive at the paper plate, Abby would read the phrase that a leader says. We would then all repeat it together a few times. She would then turn the paper plate over to read the leader quality on the other side. I would then paraphrase the paragraph from Kidz ‘n Power for them. Really good stuff. Great learning going on here.

They took turns being the leader as they went to each paper plate to discover a new truth. With all of these strong character traits of a leader, it is important to emphasize that Jesus really taught us how to be a servant leader.