Character education has become a product. There are programmes with binders and licences and annual renewal fees, and some of them are decent, and almost none of them do anything you could not do with a story and a wall.
I am going to describe the whole method here, free, and you can decide afterwards whether you need anything else.
One word at a time
Pick a fault. Not a value, a fault. Impatience is easier for a child to see than patience, because they have felt it.
Give it a week. Say it once on Monday and then stop explaining it.
Attach it to somebody who is not the child
This is the mechanism the whole tradition rests on. A child will discuss a fox's rudeness at length and their own for about four seconds.
So the fault belongs to an animal, or a character in any story you already have. Never to a child in the room, and never, ever as an example.
Let the consequence do the teaching
The story stops. Something has gone wrong for the animal because of what the animal did. Nobody in the story explains this.
If you explain it afterwards, you have converted a story into a lesson and the children will file it accordingly. The silence after the last line is not a gap in your teaching. It is the teaching.
Put the word on the wall
Written, at child height, with a picture. It stays up all week doing nothing, which is exactly what it should do.
Children point at things on walls. They rarely point at things in a closed binder.
Name the way out
A fault on its own is a dead end. Name the virtue that answers it, next to it, at the same time. Boastfulness next to modesty. Impatience next to waiting.
A programme that only lists ways to be wrong leaves a five-year-old with a longer list of failures and no door.
Wait for the third week
First week they repeat the word. Second week they use it about somebody else, loudly, usually in front of a visitor. Somewhere in the third or fourth week, if you have said nothing, one of them uses it about themselves.
That is the whole thing. There is no faster route and no programme that shortens it.
What you actually need
Any book of fables, a wall, a marker, and the discipline to stop talking after the last line.
Aesop is out of copyright and free in every library in the world. That is a complete character education programme and it costs nothing.
And what I sell, honestly placed
Sing Me a Fable is the packaged version of exactly the method above: twenty-six faults A to Z, each named in gold, each with its answering virtue on the card, each with a song, a game and a colouring page. $49.95 during the launch.
It saves you the assembling. It does not do anything you could not do yourself with a library card, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
Start free if you like. The twenty-six colouring posters are one animal per letter, no charge, and they will paper a wall for a term. The weekly structure is here.