Citizenship Skills

Reflection/Review

• What are the 7 Citizenship Skills?
• Can you explain how some of these skills are interdependent?
• How do you use these skill in your everyday life?
• How can you improve yourself with these skills?

The Citizenship Skills

Respect

• "Insure domestic tranquility..."
• This means to accept your fellow citizens.
• Respect is accepting the differences in others and honoring those differences.

What Respect is:

• Respect is NOT loving everyone but accepting them. This is difficult in a multicultural nation like the US.

The Importance of Respect

Cooperation

• Without respect the nation would resort to wars, fighting over our differences.

Fairness

• "We the people..."
• The Preamble doesn't begin by talking about individuals, it speaks about the US as a whole.
• This emphasizes the importance of us all working together.
• Cooperation is the art of working as a group towards a common goal. It is a attitude of group awareness and willingness to help each other reach a common goal.

• "Establish justice..."
• This statement is saying to consider the common good as well as that of the individuals.
• Fairness is the act of tempering individual desires with the need of society as a whole.

What Fairness is:

• NOT everyone receiving what they want
• It is weighing your individual desires against that of a community and then deciding what is best for a majority.

What Cooperation is:

Patience

• Cooperation, though it may require at times for us to willingly subordinate our own desires for the whole to operate at it's optimum level, it does NOT mean we give up our beliefs and opinions for the good or support of the group.
• When we cooperate we are utilizing everyone's individual talents and differences.

Without cooperation, humans would break down into bickering, they would constantly be fighting themselves, and society would fall apart.

• "A more perfect union"
• This skill portrays the idea of moving forward and progressing.
• Patience is the skill of knowing the proper timing for acting on an idea or decision.

What Patience is NOT

• Patience is not JUST waiting for something.
• Patience is knowing when to act and when to fight.

The Importance of Patience

• Patience is one of the hardest skills to practice. Sometimes this is due to the fact that we as people expect to receive what we want and when we want it.
• Without patience actions will be rash and under developed. This could lead to great weakness within our nation.

Citizenship

Skills

The Preamble

• "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide common defense, promote general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty..."

Strength

Can you identify any of the Citizenship Skills?

• "Provide for the common defense..."
• This means that you stand up for what is right and denounce what is wrong and you admit your mistakes.
• Strength is the willingness of a citizen to stand up for what they believe in.

The Seven Citizenship Skills

Self-Improvement

What Are Citizenship Skills?

• These individual skills are all interdependent on each other. In order to exercise one of these skills you must use the others as well.

• Cooperation
• Patience
• Fairness
• Respect
• Strength
• Self-Improvement
• Balance

What Strength is:

• "Promote general welfare..."
• This means to seek knowledge and skills.
• Self-Improvement is a desire to continually learn new skills and improve on others.

• Strength is not JUST being able to lift the heaviest weight nor is it JUST doing the opposite of everyone else.
• Strength is knowing right from wrong and being able to ACT on that knowledge.

Can you define any of these skills?

The Importance of Strength

• If there wasn't a single citizen that knew right from wrong and had the ability to act the nation would be highly susceptible to corruption or collapse.

What Self-Improvement is:

• Self-improvement does not mean we must all become perfect.
• It is because of our imperfection that we always are trying to become better.

The Importance of Self-Improvement

• Self-Improvement is the key to the continuous progress within our nation. Without it nothing would ever become better. All would remain the same.

The Citizenship Skills (cont.)

Balance

Citizenship Skills

• "Secure the blessing of liberty..."
• This means to support our nation's ideals of freedom, equality, and unity.
• Balance is the understanding that there is more than one side to every issue.

• Citizenship skills are basic human values envisioned by the Founding Fathers when they drafted the Constitution.
• There are 7 citizenship skills.
• They all can be found in the Preamble of the Constitution.

What Balance is:

• Balance isn't the skill of being able to place things on a scale. Balance is accepting that there are two sides to a story.
• To have balance you must be able to compromise and harmonize all ideas and option to find a solution.

The Importance of Balance

• Without balance all of the differing ideas and opinions would run a muck and cause great amounts of conflict.

By: Madison Rivera