The Murnaghan--Nakayama rule is a combinatorial rule for the character values of symmetric groups. We give a new combinatorial proof by explicitly finding the trace of the representing matrices in the standard basis of Specht modules. This gives an essentially bijective proof of the rule. A key lemma is an extension of a straightening result proved by the second author to skew-tableaux. Our module theoretic methods also give short proofs of Pieri's rule and Young's rule.