New Book Helps Out!

Yes, manners should be taught at home, but if a teacher can help reinforce good manners at school in a fun way, why not?

Mind Your Manners, Ben Bunny (Scholastic Press) is fine fun! Author and illustrator Mavis Smith makes excellent use of the popular lift-the-flap format. But don’t let the primary-grade format fool you. Mind Your Manners is a great way to introduce good manners to kids of all ages! Students will recognize some of their manner slipups in Smith’s humorous animal illustrations. For example, bulldog, kitten, and bunny are making quite a mess as they greedily chow down in the book’s first scene:

Gobble, slurp, chomp! Crunch, crunch, crunch!

Ben Bunny and his friends were eating lunch.

Enter friend Crow — flip the flap! — and the manner-less trio gets a lesson in proper dining:

“Don’t you know,” said the crow, “it’s very rude

to make so much noise when you chew your food?”

Before you take another bite,

I’ll show you how to be polite.”

Subsequent lessons cover such dining disasters as wearing a hat at the dinner table, not using a napkin, playing with food, taking huge mouthfuls of food, talking with a full mouth, not saying thank you, and getting up from the table without being excused — because &

“& using good manners is an excellent habit

for kittens and bulldogs and even a rabbit!”

The lessons in Mind Your Manners, Ben Bunny — done with humor underlined with seriousness — can be lasting. And the book opens up some delightful possibilities: Why not have your students write their own good-manner rhymes, draw their own lift-the-flap illustrations, and publish a sequel to Mind Your Manners, Ben Bunny? It might surprise you to learn that you have a classroom full of Miss Manners.

– Gene Bedley