Staff and students at Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary have been focusing on character traits all school year. For the month of January, the trait they centered on was empathy. The definition they used throughout the month was “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” The school’s Student Council took it one “step” further by creating the Empathy Challenge. Each time a staff member, or fellow student, witnessed acts of empathy, they would give the person a paper shoe to color. Those were then added to the “Empathy Jar”, which was a giant poster filled with the shoe cut-outs that were colored by the empathetic student.