Monday, October 28, 2013

What You Value Your Children (or Students) Will Value Too


Whatever you as a teacher or parent esteem, so will your children or students.
If you love to diagram sentences and make it fun, they will hardly be able to contain themselves until it it their turn to go up to the board and diagram a sentence themselves.

If you love music and singing, and choose quality songs that are also enjoyable to sing, your students will also probably develop a love for singing.

If you want them to use the dictionary, then model that for them.  One of my prized possessions is a 1947 Webster’s New American Dictionary (all 1,241 pages of it) that I acquired at a book sale for free.  I love to make sure that I got the correct spelling.  (It is not only embarrassing but also reduces your students’ esteem for you if you make mistakes on a regular basis.)  So, I grab my big ‘ol dictionary, smell the wonderful aroma when I open the pages, and look up my word.  My students enjoy dictionaries and encyclopedias because I have modeled that for them.

Once a week they get to take an encyclopedia to their desks and write about or draw pictures of interesting things they find in its pages.  Quite often they find something we have studied in history and they delight in sharing it with me.

By the same token, if we love texting, they will too.  They will not be able to contain themselves until they too, can reach the age where they will be awarded their very own personal cell phone. By the way, my husband and I share our family phone.  And when we do get a text, we share it with the whole family.  :-)

Be what you would like your students to be.