Manners Monday

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.

Emily Post

Here are the basics for my manners/virtues lessons:

Lesson Plan Format
Song
Review of last week's lesson
Lesson/Story
Activity/Practice

My plan is to only spend about 15-20 minutes each Monday on these lessons. They should be fun, easy, flexible, and focused on concepts that the kids need to learn at that moment. So, if I notice that my boys are having a hard time with saying "Thank you", then I will plan a thank you lesson for that week. The concepts can also be taught over and over again (as much as needed) with different materials. I will also reinforce the concepts through out the week. Manner and virtue instruction is really on-going, but with these lessons I can refer back to them. "Remember what the boy in the story said..."

Concepts

• Please
• Thank you
• Sorry
• Greeting/Meeting People
• Stranger Danger
• Honesty
• Helping 
• Sharing
• Kindness
• Happy Attitude
• Gratitude
• Saying nice things--compliments
• Yucky words
• Phone etiquette
• Table etiquette
• Patriotism
• Service
• Reverence

Here is a little song that I made up:
The Good Manners Song (sing to "Are you sleeping")
We say thank you;
We say please;
We say sorry;
We say excuse me;
We cough into our elbow,
And sneeze into our elbow.
We are polite.
We are polite.