Welcome! Ready to dive into some Virtues Tree fun? Here are first steps to help you get started quickly:

1. Introduce the idea to your family and involve them from the start.
2. Create a homemade Virtues Tree or select a pre-made one (see ideas here) and place it in a special place in your home where you spend some time together regularly as a family, so it becomes a part of your conversations. Done? Yay! Have a little Virtues Tree dance or celebration to mark this happy addition to your family!
3. Pick a virtue and select some of the activities to do. Then have fun together doing them.
4. When you’re ready to focus on a new virtue, create a Virtues Fruit for the virtue you’ve been exploring and attach it onto your Virtues Tree as part of a wrap-up celebration. If you’re using the Tender Sapling Virtues Tree poster (in development), your child can make a homemade fruit, color in the ink drawing of the Virtues Fruit that comes with the poster, and/or cut out the color Virtues Fruit that also comes with the poster.

Rinse. Repeat!

This can be done by just your family or as a group of families from a children’s virtues class. Adjust anything here to work for you, and don’t feel like you have to do everything. Above all, have fun!

And remember to talk regularly on the virtues and fruits already explored. Our kids loved when I “picked” a piece of a virtues fruit that might help them in a certain situation and offer them a “nibble” to power them up to handle that life moment. It’s been too long since our family’s first Virtues Tree round, and I’m excited to get started again too…let’s go!

Oh, and if you have time, please also comment on what activities you tried here, so we can all enjoy and benefit from your experience. With lots of families trying these activities out, we should end up with some great suggestions and improvements to make the Virtues Tree activities better for the next round of folks. New ideas are most welcome too.

Thank you for joining this community. Happy Virtues Tree-ing!