During two months of the summer
my students are on holidays,
so I am without
my many talented writers and artists
and their contributions to this blog
until September.
For this reason I have to
think of other kinds of posts.
On other blogs I have seen
teachers writing about books
that they have found useful in school.
This is a book that has influenced
my teaching:
This is my well worn copy!
I bought ‘Self Esteem: A Classroom Affair,
101* Ways to Help Children Like Themselves’
by Michele and Craig Borba
in 1980, as a student teacher.
It was an unusual book for its time
full of ideas for developing
a child’s self esteem.
At the time, it seems to me school
was much more about developing
a child academically;
their cognitive rather than
their ‘affective’ learning.
It was to be 1983 for example
before Howard Gardner published
his theory of ‘multiple intelligences’.
(Gardner, Howard (1983),
Frames of Mind:
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,
Basic Books, NY)
Gardner proposed that people do not
have just a intellectual ability, but have
many different intelligences
including intrapersonal
which would exist within the mind
and thus relate to the ‘affective’,
to moods, feelings, and attitudes.
I feel this book
‘Self Esteem: A Classroom Affair’
was before its time, with contents like:
‘Teach Children to Praise Themselves’ and
‘Helping Children to See Their Progress.
I have used many
of the activities in this book
repeatedly over the course
of my teaching career.
Just in case I ever ran out of ideas
there was always Volume 2:
It was in this book that I first learnt about
‘bibliotherapy’ i.e. the judicious use of books
as therapy for children.
In this modern age Dr. Michele Borba
is still dispensing ‘words of wisdom’.
You can read more of these here.