This character education mini-lesson is not intended to be a service learning lesson or to meet the K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice. The character education units will be most effective when taught in conjunction with a student-designed service project that provides a real world setting in which students can develop and practice good character and leadership skills.  For ideas and suggestions for organizing service events go to The League.

Anticipatory Set:
Remind the learners that they have been talking about how people care about causes and social issues, and they have been looking at examples of celebrities who care. Acknowledge that none of them in the classroom have celebrity status (and all that goes along with it) as resources to make a big difference.

• Read this story to the learners:
  An early morning tide brought in and stranded thousands of starfish on a beach. An elderly man, out for a morning stroll, noticed these thousands of stranded starfish and began tossing them one-by-one back into the sea in an effort to save them from certain death. A young jogger on the beach could see a person on the shoreline going back and forth. As he approached, he realized it was a man throwing starfish back into the sea. The jogger thought this was a futile act since the man could not possibly save all the starfish. As he passed the man, he stopped and said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of starfish. You can't possibly make a difference."  While picking up yet another starfish and pausing for only the briefest of moments, the elderly man held out the starfish in his hand to the jogger and said as he turned to toss it back into the sea, "I sure made a difference to that one!"
• Hold a class discussion about the meaning of the story and how it applies to them as people who care.
• Ask the learners to take out their lists of causes and social issues they care about and write one small idea for an action they can take to "make a difference to that one."